


Wir träumen uns beide wach

by acroamatica, CyanideBreathmint



Series: Just Don't Put Down Your Guns, Yet [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Ace!Phasma, M/M, Modern AU, No Angst, OK I lied there is angst, Smut, Suitporn, automotive porn, contains poetry, contains temporary character death, extractionverse, foodporn, gunporn, straight razor porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-27
Updated: 2016-02-19
Packaged: 2018-05-16 15:50:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 72,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5831524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acroamatica/pseuds/acroamatica, https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. Bren Hux takes the Queen’s shilling. His bosses loan him to the Americans when they need a chemist. This is how he meets point woman Nic Phasma, and architect Kylo Ren. Hux and Ren get along like a house on fire. Which is to say, a lot of smouldering and then a flashover that blows out the windows. </p><p>This is part of the Inception modern AU.</p><p>The title translates to "We dream each other awake".</p><p>PS: There will be smut but you'll have to wait for Chapter 3. Sorry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Note: This is another fic in the Inception modern AU series. Mind heists, suit porn and gun porn.
> 
> Title taken from the last line of Einstürzende Neubauten’s _Stella Maris._ Yes, I have weird musical taste. 
> 
> Nicole is not Phasma’s first name, but it’s the one she will respond to. Phasma does not think she looks like a Robin.

Dr. Bren Hux was of the opinion that modern aviation was simply not a civilized way to travel. He disliked the wait times in crowded airports, found the petty indignities of security checks tedious, and felt that the likelihood of sitting next to a fellow traveler with objectionable opinions and worse manners was much too high. Give him a steamer trunk, he thought; a leisurely voyage across the Atlantic on board an ocean liner, and things would be more pleasant, at any rate. 

He knew rightly that the above opinion was at least half nostalgic longing for a past that never really was, that passengers in steerage probably never enjoyed their journey, and that his chances of encountering a boor with questionable politics was likely just as high, and he would be trapped with them for three weeks, besides. 

Nevertheless, Hux felt as though the world had lost something with the end of the steamship era as he sat in a window seat in Business Class, staring out at the clouds beneath him. He had re-read his copy of the _Guardian_ thrice, finished the crossword and cryptic crossword in pen and even taken a stab at the day’s Sudoku, but the plane hung still over the Atlantic Ocean with five hours’ flight time left to go. 

The reassuring weight of the Browning Hi-Power holstered under his left arm reminded him that he had at least been able to bypass security with his work passport and official credentials; that his bosses back at the Vauxhall Trollop had mercifully let him fly Business this time (as long as he kept all the receipts) and that the cabin crew on this BA flight had been wonderfully indulgent with the wine (a nice, dry red) this time. Besides, the sweaty red-faced American seated beside Hux had glanced at his copy of the _Guardian_ , noted its masthead and the front-page article excoriating George Osborne and decided not to engage in conversation. Good. 

Now if only he wasn’t headed to a new duty assignment in Langley, Virginia. He had been summoned a week ago to his direct superior’s office, escorted from there to a private meeting room. He had entered the meeting room wondering if something had gone terribly wrong on one of his previous clandestine assignments and calculating the odds of his neck being on the chopping block, only to be questioned on his medical credentials for half an hour while a pair of gray-faced Americans had listened impassively to his replies. 

Hux had graduated with his MB BChir at Cambridge, yes. Had been provisionally registered to practice with the General Medical Council and done his first year as a junior house officer with the NHS in Reading. He had planned to specialize in anesthesiology. That had changed when an old family friend had contacted him discreetly about a job opening in London, and he had left medical practice to take the Queen’s shilling at Vauxhall. It had all been in his employee dossier, and he had wondered a little impatiently why nobody had bothered to look everything up. 

Hux had stopped wondering when they notified him of his very new promotion and clearance level, and then handed him a sheaf of files. The process had not been an interrogation, but an interview. The Americans had been pursuing dreamshare technology out of DARPA for the past decade or so, but only recently had it been a plausible option in the field. Now the CIA was assembling a team jointly with the SIS, and he had been tapped to join it as its new chemist. With the promotion came a new duty assignment in the US and a new passport in his workname, a ticket on a BA flight to Dulles International Airport from Heathrow, and instructions to wrap up his affairs and pack what he needed for a long stay. He would depart in a week. 

Hux had broken up with his lover that night. Justin was the least of his problems, really; he worked in finance, had decent taste in suits and wine and no discernible personality, and Hux was mostly with him because he was good in bed. He could be sent gently on his way with few injured feelings on either side. 

It had taken him two more days to figure out what to do with his book collection. It helped that he kept books mostly for the reading and not for their condition, but replacing most of the books he owned with digital copies had hurt nevertheless. The volumes he could not part with he put into storage, saving only one to bring with him to the US. The rest of his life fit in two suitcases, one carry-on bag and a garment bag, and he had charmed one of the flight attendants into hanging his suit jackets in the first class closet. 

He stared out of the window until the clouds started to bore him, and then reached under his seat for his carry-on bag, drew out his Kindle, and started to read. Beneath him the Atlantic Ocean sped by, its immensity vast and indifferent as the plane carried its passengers westward.

\---

Hux bypassed security at Dulles using his official credentials again – the sidearm and straight razor he had been carrying would have given Customs and Border Protection a collective heart attack if he had been required to pass any kind of screening. He collected his luggage at the carousel, deposited it on a cart, and then headed straight for a tall blonde woman he saw holding a placard with his workname on it in capital letters. WILL ELLIS, it said, and she had smiled thinly when he stepped out to meet her.

“Phasma,” he said, recognizing her from the dossiers the Americans had sent to Vauxhall. She was an English-born dual citizen, had been the first operative assigned to the team that he was joining, and he remembered the profile and CV that he had received in supplementary materials for his assignment. Phasma had started out as a network security expert with a degree from Caltech, but the skills in her chosen field of expertise had also been very useful in performing acts of intrusion. She had started doing government work eight months after Uncle Sam had poached her from a small Silicon Valley startup. He remembered being impressed by her qualifications and the parts of her career that he had access to.

“Doctor.” They shook hands. Phasma’s hand was warm, dry, callused, her grip strong but not crushingly so. “It’s good to meet you,” she said. “I hope you’ve had a pleasant flight.” She was taller than him, he realized, and her eyes were a darker, richer blue than his own, a color echoed by the summer weight wool-silk blend of her very nice suit. 

Hux gave the suit an appraising glance, realized that it had originated in high-end menswear and that she had probably had it tailored to fit from the perfect length of her sleeves and wonderful waist suppression in her coat. The blouse beneath was a soft pearly gray that complimented her fair complexion to great effect. “Six hours in a pressurized metal tube going eight hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, ten thousand meters over the Atlantic Ocean?” Hux shrugged. “I’m just pleased to be alive.”

“Not a fan of flying, I see,” Phasma said as they stepped into the exhaust-smelling warmth and humidity of the parking garage. Her accent, still quite close to his own, had been sharpened a little from time spent in the United States, but she retained the non-rhoticity and unmerged vowels of Received Pronunciation.

“Just one of the things I do for Queen and country,” Hux sighed wearily. Everything felt heavier for some reason. Surely there could not be more gravity on the North American continent than in the United Kingdom – given their politics there was simply no way Americans could possess that much gravitas in any event. 

Phasma helped Hux with his luggage when they arrived at her car. Normally he would have protested and taken care of his possessions himself, that being the gentlemanly thing to do, but he also got the distinct feeling that it would not have gone over well with Phasma, so he held his tongue. Besides, chivalry was in no way sex-linked and he saw no problem in her exercising it in his direction.

Phasma sat down in the driver’s seat, closed the door. “First,” she said as Hux buckled himself into the passenger seat, on the right (wrong) side of the car, “I’m going to show you to the secure housing you’ll be living in.” Hux raised an eyebrow, but did not say anything. It was nice, he supposed, that he was not to be cast out into the streets to fend for himself straight off the bat. 

His watch and his body were telling him that it was currently 11 PM and high time he was asleep. The dashboard clock in Phasma’s car told him that it was currently 6 PM and definitely not time for bed. This was not the first time Hux had ever had to deal with jet lag, but something about the permanent nature of this duty assignment made it feel worse – that he did not have a “normal” time to return to, that he would have to adjust to living here in America where people drove on the wrong side of the road. 

It was a sense of displacement he had never felt through his years of boarding school, or during his previous assignments outside British borders, and it left him feeling vaguely confused and disoriented on this elongated Friday evening.

\---

They crossed the Potomac River on the American Legion Memorial Bridge, and then Phasma followed the Beltway northeast into Maryland proper. She turned eastward on exit 39, and then continued into Bethesda on 190 E, following it until they reached a pleasant red brick house with a single-car garage at the end of its short driveway.

Hux had dutifully looked up local rents before he had found out about the secure housing he would be afforded, and the size of this house was somewhat disproportionate for just one person given real estate prices. He would later blame the long flight and the general upset of relocating across the Atlantic for the foolish assumption that he would actually get to live there alone.

“It’s a nice place,” Phasma said after she had parked the car in the garage. She took one of his suitcases and his garment bag, leaving the other suitcase and the carry-on bag for him. “Just five minutes’ walk from downtown.” She punched in a passcode for the home security system and opened the foyer door after a single beep. A warm smell of cheese and tomatoes wafted into the garage, and Hux’s laggard suspicions were only confirmed as she led him upstairs. 

“That bedroom there,” Phasma said, pointing to the door furthest from the second floor staircase landing, “is mine. I just moved in three days ago. There are two empty bedrooms here.” She indicated the doors to their right, set perpendicular from the bathroom door. 

“We’ll be sharing this house,” Hux said belatedly as his brain finally generated enough wattage to light the bulb of perception. 

“Makes more sense,” Phasma shrugged. “We all share the same clearances, and it’s easier to handle security for one house than three separate apartments.” 

“You’re expecting a third person to move in,” Hux said dully as he checked the left-hand bedroom, looked in the walk-in closet. No good. Half the space in it had been taken up by the small linen closet that opened into the hallway next to the bathroom. 

“There is a third member of the team, our architect,” Phasma said. “He’s currently driving down from Boston, splitting the 8-hour trip over two days. He’ll be here tomorrow.”

“I see.” Hux did not actually see the point of having the third team member drive to Maryland from Boston when he could simply have flown. He checked the right-hand bedroom closet, and dropped his suitcase within after checking that it was of satisfactory size. 

“You like this one?” Phasma deposited his other suitcase on the bedroom floor, handed him his garment bag. He hung it up in the closet, looked around. At least the room was furnished, he thought, a small, plain desk, an equally plain chair, a double bed and a small nightstand on its right hand side. There was, thank God, an alarm clock on the nightstand, and a modest, empty bookshelf sat against the wall on the left side of the bed. 

“It will do.” Hux left his carry-on bag on the room’s small desk. He could go through it later. 

“I’ll leave you to unpack,” Phasma said, “There’s a gun safe behind a hidden panel in the right hand side of your closet. The combination is in the folder in your nightstand drawer with the security system pass codes. Destroy the slips when you’ve memorized them. You’ve brought electronics, right?” 

“A personal laptop, an ebook reader,” Hux said, fishing them out of his carry-on bag. He left the Kindle on top of his laptop, rummaged in the bag for his power cords. He did not know how, but in the six hours of the flight the contents of the bag had rearranged themselves entirely from how he had painstakingly arranged them before he had left London for the last time.

Phasma glanced at the growing pile of possessions displaced onto the desk in Hux’s search for the power cords. “Hit me up for the home network password later. The router is in my room. We’ll issue you a phone and a work laptop when we start work Monday, and the authenticator for your work VPN access. I assume they’re as longwinded and tedious about network security in London as in D.C.? Do you have the right power adaptors for US power sockets?” 

Hux had to pause to remember whether he had packed those, found them before he remembered, and then nodded. “Yes.”

“Good.” Phasma turned to leave the room, stopped as though she had just forgotten something, and then turned back to address him. “Do you also want dinner, or do you just want me to let you go to sleep?” 

“It’s only –” he glanced at his watch, did a brief mental calculation, “7 PM here.” For some unaccountable reason the power cords had tangled themselves together in a knot that had wedged itself into the bottom-left corner of the bag. 

“Okay.” Phasma watched him try to untangle the knotted power cords, smiled briefly when he gave up and dumped them on the desk along with the rest of the carry-on bag’s contents. “I made lasagna today. I’ll come get you for dinner in half an hour?”

“Excellent,” Hux said. “Thank you.” 

“I’m Nic, by the way. Nicole Phasma.” She extended her hand outwards again, and he clasped it, shook. This second handshake felt warmer, less perfunctory, somehow. 

“Brendan Hux. You can call me Bren,” he said as she let go of his hand. She had used her real name with him, and he thought that he should return the gesture.

“It really is nice to meet you,” Phasma said. “Before I forget – you probably didn’t pack any towels or bedding, so I got you a spare set. I left them in the linen closet near the bathroom.” 

“Thank you,” Hux breathed as she left, wondering if it was at all possible to canonize a woman he had just met as a saint. He still felt faintly disoriented, as though his sense of magnetic north had shifted (or maybe the world had just shifted under him, and in a way it had), but he thought that he would be able to deal with the changes as long as the third teammate was someone as organized and dependable as her.

\---

Dinner was a quiet, informal meal, and Hux thanked a God he no longer believed in that Phasma was considerate enough to cook dinner and also not expect any witty conversation out of him. There was also something about her lasagna that was immensely restorative – and Hux felt himself experiencing a brief second wind.

“It’s my grandmother’s recipe, my mum’s mom,” Phasma had said when he had asked of its origins after a delighted first bite, “She kept the béchamel sauce, and used Parmigiano-Reggiano instead of ricotta cheese. Her family came from Pozzuoli in Naples back in the 30s.”

“I’ve been to Naples,” Hux said after his third and fourth bites. “Yours is better.” He reached for his water glass, lifted it, and then had to pause to swallow a yawn. 

“I was thinking,” Phasma said, “about the most comforting thing I could feed someone whose last meal was English airline food, and this was the answer.” 

Hux decided then that sainthood was not enough for Phasma, that she would have to be deified and venerated in the cult of culinary ideals.

\---

Hux went upstairs after dinner. Phasma had refused his offers of help with the dishes.

“I’m not the one who just flew in from Heathrow,” she told him. “It’s probably six hours past your normal bedtime. Go sleep. We can work out the chore roster tomorrow when Ren arrives.”

Ren. That would have to be the name of the third team member, their architect, the one whose dossier he was not privy to. As team leader Phasma would need to know more than Hux did, so that lack of disclosure made sense. Hux collected the spare towels and bedding from the hall closet, gravitated to the blue set on the top shelf, as opposed to the red set on the middle shelf. Then he went into his room and continued to unpack. There were a dozen wooden hangers in the closet, all brand-new and wrapped in a cardboard sleeve that he removed and discarded in the wastepaper basket under his desk. The wooden hangers were accompanied by several wire hangers, the kind one got from low-quality dry cleaners.

Hux hung his suits, shirts and waistcoat up with the wooden hangers and pointedly ignored the wire ones, packed the rest of his clothing in the wire drawers in the left side of the closet. His neckties went carefully rolled into the top drawer next to his socks, under the shirts hanging on the closet bar above. The wooden hangers were good enough for his shirts, he decided, but he would have to get suit-specific hangers, and soon – Hux did not see the point in spending all that money on Savile Row only to torture his suit jackets on hangers not designed specifically to support them. One might as well use pound notes as rolling papers. 

He put his shagreen dressing case temporarily in the little bookshelf next to his bed, placed the sole book he had brought opposite it on the other end of the shelf. The little volume gleamed against the shelf’s pale wood veneer, its hand-tooled leather and gilt edges catching the light. It was a collection of Rimbaud’s poems in the original French, its contents every bit as lush and gorgeous as its exterior. Hux had bought it on an assignment in Paris, and he had not able to bear the thought of parting with it when he had culled most of his book collection in London. The book’s presence, more than anything else, made this room feel more lived-in than just the collection of furniture, the door and walls that constrained its space. 

Hux put his empty suitcases away, sat down on the unmade bed and sighed, deeply weary. This place was not really home, not yet, but it would have to do. He unlaced his boots, took them off, and then staggered off to the bathroom for a hot shower before bed. He set his alarm clock for 7 AM. No use in sleeping in too long – it would only delay his adjustment to the time change.

\---

Hux slept deeply and dreamlessly, the sweet blessed sleep of the blameless, and he had been working on more of the same when he was rudely awoken by an earsplitting electronic shriek. His training took over as he rolled straight out of bed, and drew his Browning Hi-Power from the shoulder holster he had left on the nightstand next to his alarm clock before he had gone to sleep last night.

A quick glance at the alarm clock’s illuminated dial told him that it was 6.30 AM, that by all rights he should still be in bed were it not for this intruder who had tripped the house’s security system. Hux did not consider himself a bloodthirsty specimen most of the time, but now he very much wanted someone to die. 

He met Phasma right outside his room door. She stood at the stair landing with her sidearm in one hand – a stainless-finished 1911 – and a high-powered flashlight in the other. She did not look adequately rested herself, with her formerly sleek blonde hair tousled and curling about her face. She wore a faded old Caltech t-shirt with a pair of flannel pyjama bottoms, and she gave Hux a meaningful look as he came up beside her. “I’m going down first,” she whispered to him as the alarm shriek cut off abruptly. “Watch my back.”

Hux nodded, hung back to cover her blind spot as she descended the steps slowly. She looked downward as she prowled, hugging the outer curve of the stairs, and paused at the landing. Hux slipped past her at a low crouch so as not to cross her line of fire and turned smoothly and quickly to slice the pie even as she covered his approach. 

Hux waited just above the foot of the stairs using the stairwell wall as cover, and he felt the knuckles of Phasma’s off hand brush his bare shoulder as she slid in front of him and stepped out. He looked briefly away as she turned her flashlight on to blind the person silhouetted in the house’s open front door, and then adjusted his aim as his eyes grew accustomed to the light. 

“Stop. Hands up where I can see them,” Phasma called out as her flashlight stabbed a broad beam into the dimly lit interior. Her illuminated target was tall, thin, male, clad wholly in black with a dark cloud of tangled unruly hair swirling around his head. His empty hands went up slowly, easily, palm-out as he turned away from the alarm system’s keypad to face her.

“Hi, Phasma,” he said, his voice deep, resonant, seemingly unfazed despite the four-hundred lumen light and the guns pointed at his face. “Sorry I didn’t call. I thought you would be in bed.” 

Phasma made a frustrated sound of exasperation; flicked the flashlight off. “Ren?” she asked. Hux noticed that she did not lower her gun. _Good,_ Hux thought, _let the bastard stew,_ as he kept the tritium sights of his Hi-Power steady and level at “Ren”. 

“Could I get a little help here?” Ren asked, shrugging with his hands still up as though being held at gunpoint was just a minor inconvenience instead of the potentially life-ending incident it actually was. 

“You were supposed to be here later. Closer to 12 PM,” Phasma said as she lowered her sidearm, flicked the safety back on. 

“Yeah, well, turns out I didn’t really feel that sleepy, so I just kept driving. You,” he said, glancing at Hux. “You can stop pointing your gun at me now, Ginger.” 

Hux sighed and lowered his Browning Hi-Power, safed it. _Ginger._

“Christ Jesus, Kylo Ren,” Phasma grumbled as Ren shut the door with the deadbolt engaged so it would not latch. “Six-fucking-thirty in the morning is too early for me to be clearing my own staircase because you punched in the wrong security passcode.”

“I brought coffee and bagels,” Ren said, as though that were adequate recompense. Hux took a long, deep breath and rolled his eyes ceilingward before he went back upstairs, retreated to his room to dress himself decently. He caught a brief glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror as he headed for his room, and then sighed deeply, shut his room door behind him. 

Hux liked to make sure he gave a good impression. Stubbly-faced and half-naked in pyjama pants with his hair sticking up from the pillow was not generally what he thought of as a good impression. He put his sidearm back in its holster on the nightstand and had started to choose his clothes for the day when the alarm clock went off behind him. 

Damn Kylo Ren and his eyes, he thought as he turned the alarm off, damn this new posting in the US.

\---

Hux felt more like himself after a slow shave and an indulgent shower. The hot water relaxed him, banished the adrenaline remnant in his bloodstream and woke him up a little more – something sorely needed after his interrupted sleep and rude awakening this morning. He let the water drum lightly on his face and chest as he washed the suds of his soap off, eyes closed under the shower for a minute, and then he turned the water off and dried himself off with his new blue towel.

He hung his towel carefully on the rack, and then reached into his open dressing case, removed his badger-bristle brush, the small tin of shaving soap, and the tiny brown glass bottle of shaving oil. He put small drops of oil on the palms of his hands, rubbed the oil carefully into his face and then let it do its work while he lathered up the cake of soap in its tin with round sweeps of his badger-bristle brush. The stiff bristles worked up a creamy lather, and he brushed it on with light, quick strokes against his chin and jaw, over his cheekbones. 

Hux took his grandfather’s pearl-handled straight razor out of its little leather sheath in his dressing case – that was where he kept it when he wasn’t carrying it around for professional reasons – and tested it on his left thumbnail, then pared away at his stubble with light, smooth passes, shaving with the grain first. He rinsed, relathered and then shaved a second time, this time against the grain. Each whisper of the razor calmed him, grounded him. It felt as though he were sewing himself into the face he wore professionally every day, carving his profile slowly into relief. 

He ran his hand experimentally over his face, found it satisfactorily smooth, and then washed the razor under running water, dabbed it dry with a clean flannel he kept folded in his dressing case. He would oil it lightly later, before he transferred it to his trouser pocket for the day. Now he washed his face, dried it lightly and then took a tiny cobalt glass moisturizer jar in his hand, unscrewed the top and began to work the cream into his face and the backs of his hands. 

Long experience as a pallid natural redhead had taught him to use a moisturizer with an SPF of at least 20 – any less and he would look less like himself and more like a large freckle with speckles of paleness showing through. That done, he applied deodorant and a modest spray of cologne. He put on his layers of clothing as he considered his suit and tie for the day; chose cufflinks with that in mind. Today he picked out a pair of green jade cufflinks, a pair of perforated discs, each set around a matte silver dome – they would look good matched to the sea-green kimono silk back of his glen plaid waistcoat and the forest green of his necktie. 

Hux decided then that he would wear his shoulder holster down to the breakfast table. Some people thought his devotion to sartorial matters excessive, ludicrous even, but it had never hurt to reinforce his force of personality with the appropriate armor and the accompanying weight of a very solid threat. The last thing he did before he left the bathroom was to comb his hair and part it neatly, a gesture akin to a mounted knight swinging his visor down into place as he spurred his destrier forward.

\---

Ren had indeed brought coffee and bagels, and the covered waxed paper cups sat in their cardboard tray in the middle of the table. He was nowhere to be seen, but Phasma had taken a spot at the table and was currently sipping slowly from her cup.

“Where is he?” Hux asked Phasma as he took up his seat, left of her at the dining table. 

“He needed the garage for his car,” Phasma said. She was still wearing her old Caltech t-shirt and the flannel pyjama pants. She had half a bagel sandwich in an open clamshell container front of her, its fillings bright, colorful. Hux glanced at the layers. Cream cheese and capers and salted salmon, tomato and onion and more cream cheese. “I had to get my keys and move my car so he could park there.” Phasma looked surprisingly cheerful despite the rude shock earlier this morning, and he wondered about her equanimity. 

Hux looked at the coffee cups remaining in the cardboard tray – Phasma had taken one of the four, which left three, and one of the remaining cups had KYLE written on it in black marker. The other one was a clear plastic cup with the dregs of something brown, slushy and creamy melting in its bottom. That left a third, unmarked cup, and Hux hefted it, noted that it was full. A brief peek under its plastic lid confirmed that the cup contained a latte, still pleasantly warm. 

Hux sipped at his coffee, found it acceptable, and put the cup down. “Kylo Ren had you get your keys, get in your car, and drive it out of the garage so he could park in it, all before you’ve had your breakfast. Is his car made of papier-mâché?” he asked Phasma. 

“Not exactly,” Phasma said with a faint smile, “but it’ll be easier to unload from the garage. He got you a bagel too, by the way.” She motioned to a brown paper bag in the middle of the dining table. Hux reached into it, found a smooth plastic container halfway down, and fished it out carefully. In it was another bagel sandwich identical to the one Phasma was currently eating. He put his sandwich in front of him, felt in the bag again to find a third plastic container and a small sheaf of napkins, retrieved them. 

Hux enjoyed bagels and lox whenever he was in the right parts of America to do so, but he had also learned from bitter experience that cream cheese did not play well with – well, everything he wore, really, and so he wrapped the bottom half of his sandwich in one of the spare napkins before he started to eat it. 

“You’ll understand when you see the car,” Phasma continued before she picked her bagel up for another bite. Hux wondered at the amusement he heard in her voice, wondered if Kylo Ren had chosen to drive from Boston overnight because he owned something rare and exotic, or at least old enough that selling it would have been unpleasant to contemplate. He thought again of the volume of Rimbaud in his bookshelf; thought that the motivation was logical enough as he fell to. 

Behind him, in the foyer, came the sounds of soft thumping, and then footfalls as Kylo Ren came to join them in the dining area. Hux studied him carefully over his cup of coffee. Ren was taller than him, Hux realized, which was something considering his own 1.85 meter height. He looked like a charcoal drawing, a caricature, all arms and legs and restless movement as he pulled up a chair and sat opposite Hux. Ren picked up his coffee cup, the one marked KYLE, and took a long sip from it. Hux found himself watching the movements of Ren’s long, pale throat as he swallowed and turned his attention back to his breakfast before Ren could notice. 

“This is quite a change, uh – do you have a name?” Ren asked. Hux realized that Ren was speaking to him in some attempt to make conversation and he swallowed, wiped at his mouth with a napkin before he replied. Ren’s eyes were the darkest ones Hux had ever seen, and there was something familiar about the set of his features that he could not quite put his finger on. It felt as though he had seen the man somewhere before, but he was also sure that today had been the first time they had met.

“Hux,” he said after he put his napkin down. Whatever goodwill Ren had built with the coffee and the bagel was still not enough to outweigh the rude and unexpected manner of his arrival or the slightly uncivilized hour of his arrival, not especially on a morning when Hux had been trying to sleep off his jet lag. 

“Hux,” Ren said softly, rolling the word around on his tongue as though savoring it. “You looked kind of Thom Yorke earlier, circa _‘I’m a creep’,_ ” he said, singing the lyric, his voice surprisingly smooth and rich, “Now you look like a John Singer Sargent.”

Hux thought of several things then – that he had not and did not ever look like Thom Yorke, that he wanted to introduce Kylo Ren face-first to the dining table, and that he was curious about the latter half of Ren’s statement, despite his personal lack of art history knowledge. “Which Sargent?” he asked, finally, hoping that it was one he knew. 

“The Portrait of Madame X.” Ren looked back down at his coffee cup, took another sip from it. Hux thought of the reference and tried to remember the painting, remembered only that it had caused scandal due to its risqué subject matter. He wasn’t exactly sure how he was supposed to feel about that.

Phasma interrupted then, her smile growing wide across her face. “If Hux looks like a Sargent portrait, then what do I look like, huh, Kylo Ren?” 

Ren put down his coffee cup and studied her with those great dark eyes, rested his pointed chin thoughtfully in the palm of his hand. “Sandro Botticelli,” he said after a few moments of silent contemplation, “The Madonna of the Book.” 

“I’m flattered, Ren,” Phasma said, her smile blooming into a grin. 

_And I am not,_ Hux thought as he finished his coffee, drained the cup to its bitter dregs.

\---

Kylo Ren asked their help in unpacking his car after breakfast, and Hux would have merrily left him to twist in the wind and haul his own possessions up the stairs had Phasma not cheerfully volunteered to help. Her cheerfulness in the face of Ren’s chutzpah only irritated Hux more as he walked from the dining to the foyer, and then stepped from the foyer into the garage.

And then Hux stopped short as he saw the car that Kylo Ren had driven the six hundred and fifty-odd kilometers from Boston, Massachusetts to Bethesda, Maryland. It was old and huge, a hulk piebald in gray primer and beige automotive filler. The car lurched oddly crocodilian, low over a long wheelbase and looked like something that should have reposed upon cinderblocks in an overgrown yard somewhere. It looked as though chickens had once roosted in its cracked vinyl interior.

“This is Falcon,” Ren said, mistaking Hux’s horrified stare for admiration. “She’s a ’68 Chevrolet Chevelle hardtop sedan. My dad gave her to me for Christmas last year.” 

_Worst Christmas present ever,_ Hux thought but did not say. 

“Are you going to restore her?” Phasma asked as Ren popped the trunk on the Chevelle, lifted a duffel bag and handed it to her. 

“I have been,” Ren said. “I was working on her over weekends until I got the job here. Dad helped.” 

“Can I help?” Phasma looked as though she had spotted a naked Tom Hardy sauntering down the street in the direction of their front door. Or Christina Hendricks, Hux appended mentally. No point in being heteronormative. 

“I’m afraid to tell you most of the fun stuff’s been done,” Ren shrugged. “Dad and I rebuilt her entirely all through spring.” Ren took out another duffel bag, held it expectantly as Phasma handed her duffel bag over to Hux. 

“What’s she got under the hood?” Phasma asked. She took the duffel bag Ren was holding and slung it onto her shoulder. 

“396 cubic inch small block, aluminum for weight reduction. 485 horsepower. I’ll show you later?” Kylo Ren reached into the trunk for a third oversized duffel bag, slung it on his shoulder, and then opened one of the back doors of the Chevelle, pulled out more possessions. It was like watching Julie Andrews remove a coatrack from a carpetbag. 

“Sure,” Phasma grinned. Ren walked around the car as Phasma edged out from beside him, out of his way, and Hux realized that Ren was now also carrying an electric bass in its case in one hand, and an amplifier in the other. 

He had not flown from Heathrow to Dulles last night, Hux thought as Ren preceded him out into the foyer, thought of the thin drywall paneling separating his room from what was soon to be Ren’s bedroom; he had flown from Heathrow directly into Hell.

Ren preceded Hux and Phasma up the stairs, and he went initially through the door on the right into Hux’s bedroom. “Uh,” Ren said, paused as he looked at the volume of Rimbaud in the shelf, the made bed, before he turned his gaze back to Hux. 

“You’re in the wrong room,” Phasma told him from the hallway, before she stepped into the empty room on the left.

“Obviously.” Ren backed out of Hux’s bedroom, bass and amplifier in hand, and Hux had to take a step backwards so that Ren would not hit him in the legs with the neck of his bass in its hardshell case. He watched as Ren and Phasma deposited Ren’s baggage in his bedroom, handed the duffel bag he had been holding to Ren through the room’s open door. “Thanks,” Ren said with a brief, shy smile unlike any other expression Hux had seen on his face prior. 

“There is more, isn’t there?” Hux asked him, thinking of the rest of the things in the back seat of that car. 

“Yeah, but it isn’t much,” Ren shrugged. “Some books, art supplies. Music. A drafting table.”

Phasma raised an eyebrow, glanced at Ren. “A drafting table? You’re on your own from here on.”

Ren laughed briefly at her reply, brief and pleasant. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s fair.” He watched as Phasma retreated down the hallway to the sanctum of her own room, regarded Hux with a long, searching stare that would have been uncomfortable were Ren’s gaze not so arresting. 

“Rimbaud, huh,” Ren said, softly, in a voice meant for Hux alone, “I didn’t think you were a reader of poetry.” 

“Strange,” Hux told him, his tone acid. “I didn’t think you could read.” He turned and stepped into the privacy of his own room, shut the door against the warm, rueful laughter, Ren’s laughter in the hallway outside.

\---

Hux had decided to ease Kylo Ren’s moving-in by making himself scarce, and he had done so by requesting the house network password from Phasma, doing some online research on local retailers, and then borrowing Phasma’s car for a quick reconnoiter of the city.

She had tossed him the keys casually while Ren had carried the pieces of his disassembled drafting table into the living room from the garage. “Just don’t damage it getting used to driving here, it’s a work vehicle.” 

“Of course not,” Hux said, and she had grinned briefly at that. “Is there anything you would like for dinner tonight?” 

“Anything someone else offers to cook is good. I’m not a picky eater,” she shrugged. “Maybe you should ask Ren, too?”

“If Ren’s a picky eater,” Hux said, “he can bloody well get his own dinner.”

\---

Hux drove first into D.C., to the closest big box housewares store. There he bought more towels and linens, a set of cedar suit hangers and a belt rack for his braces. (He had learned from personal experience that folding and storing braces in a drawer was a setup for an existential nightmare of tangles when came the time to find the right pair for the day.)

On a whim he also chose a valet stand and made a quick stop in kitchenwares for an apron, chose one in heavy denim. He would come back later once he had made an inventory of the kitchen utensils, but what he remembered seeing of Phasma’s collection had been sensible and utilitarian, and he decided to work with those for now. 

On the way back to Bethesda he stopped at several dry cleaners, vetting each one until he found one he liked. That done, it was back to Bethesda for groceries. In the grocers’ he bought some heirloom carrots and a roasting chicken, some challah rolls and a frozen mushroom medley. Noting the hour (close to lunchtime), he also picked up a large bag of salad greens, a jar of oil-cured kalamata olives and some fragrant tender heirloom tomatoes. A few more incidentals rounded off the list, and he brought his groceries back in reusable bags bought at the grocers’ themselves. 

Phasma and Ren were standing by the open garage door, admiring Ren’s nightmare of a car when he pulled back into the driveway. 

“Yeah, her inside looks like hell, but we had to rebuild her pretty much from the frame,” Ren was saying when Hux got out of Phasma’s car. “We had to replace her entire powertrain just to get her back from my uncle’s place in Iowa, so everything’s aftermarket.” 

Phasma leaned down then, crouched to look at the Chevelle’s rear wheels. “Nice disc brakes. Four-wheel drive?” Hux listened but did not interrupt. Automotive matters were not his forte after having lived and worked in London for the past five years. Instead, he turned and started to unload the groceries from Phasma’s car. Perishables first. 

“Yeah,” Ren said as Phasma straightened back up. “Wheels are 20”x10” in back, 19”x9” in front. I like the way it looks. More aggressive lines.” 

Hux took the insulated grocery bag out of the car, and Phasma extended her hand for it while continuing her conversation with Ren. “I had thought those were drag wheels,” she said, “I’m surprised you didn’t put a bigger motor in, though, seeing as she can hold a big block.”

“Dad wanted to put one of those monstrous 800 horsepower performance engines in her,” Ren said, “but we’d have had to do some serious welding to make sure the torque didn’t warp her frame, and I don’t want to deal with that kind of money in gas to keep her going on a daily basis. I mean, if I had gone with Dad’s idea I’d be raising gas prices in the D.C. area just by living here.” 

Ren was animated, excited to be talking about a pet project with a fellow autophile, and Hux found him oddly appealing in that moment. And then Ren opened his mouth again. “I’m trying to find the right pair of fuzzy dice to hang from her rear view mirror,” he said. 

Hux closed his eyes briefly, took two more bags out of Phasma’s car, and went into the house to unload the groceries. He could understand the appeal in restoring a car – the potential for skill and craft in the restoration work, the reliability of owning a vehicle one knew so intimately. But fuzzy dice? That was a bridge too far. 

Hux had started putting the groceries away when Phasma came into the kitchen with the insulated bag in her hand. “It’s about lunchtime,” she said as she put the bag down on the dining table and popped it open, “What do you want for lunch?”

“I was thinking of a salad, those heirloom tomatoes and the bocconcini,” Hux said as Phasma started handing him parcels. 

“Yum,” Phasma said, as Hux took the heirloom carrots from her hand, put them into the crisper drawer. “I was thinking of ordering a pizza.” 

“I bought enough for all of us,” he shrugged. Phasma passed him the chicken in its double layer of plastic bags, and he placed it carefully on the bottom shelf of the fridge. 

“You, Dr. Hux, are a gentleman,” Phasma told him as she reached back into the insulated bag for more groceries, a box of butter, a small basket of plums. 

“I try,” Hux said, knowing the lie in it. He had been reared and educated extensively to be a gentleman, no doubt, but the nature of his work at Vauxhall meant that he spent a lot of time and energy being very ungentlemanly indeed. And he was also fairly sure that what the Americans at Langley required of him was very likely more of the same. 

It wasn’t until Hux had finished putting the groceries in the kitchen and turned around to collect the rest of his purchases that he noticed Kylo Ren’s drafting table, assembled by one of the living room walls. A large zippered portfolio case sat beside it, as did two boxes of art materials, but it was the new drawing pinned onto the wall that caught his attention. 

The drawing was large, at least A2 in size, compressed charcoal on cream-colored handmade paper, its edges deckled. Small brass thumbtacks gleamed from its corners in the afternoon light. It was a portrait of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, or rather, a portrait of Hux as Rimbaud. The details of the clothing were accurate – the broad notched lapels on the period coat, the ribbon tie messily knotted at the collar, but the face was his, hair disheveled as it had been earlier this morning, when he had been roused untimely from his bed. The work was exquisite, the sharp planes of his face laid out in almost topographical lines of planar analysis before Ren had smudged the shadows in with a careful hand.

Written in neat letters beneath the smudged charcoal of the portrait, its rich grays and blacks, was a single line. “a thousand dreams within me softly burn.” Hux recognized the quotation instantly – it had been drawn from the Schmidt translation of Rimbaud’s _Oraison du Soir,_ his Evening Prayer – and summoned up the original French. 

_“Mille Rêves en moi font de douces brûlures,”_ Hux whispered softly under his breath. The burning dreams in the original were a wildfire compared to the gentle lamp of the translation, the line having been altered slightly for the sake of meter. He wondered then if Kylo Ren owned any French, if he too had grasped the all-consuming nature of Rimbaud’s dreams.

\---

Dinner was a simple meal – Hux roasted the chicken with tarragon butter, served it with the mushrooms sautéed with bacon lardons and onions, honey-glazed carrots with balsamic vinegar and the challah rolls that he had bought at the grocers’. He had left all of his cookbooks back in London, but all the recipes he used this evening were ones he was so familiar with that he had memorized them entirely, and the only references he had needed were quick conversions from Celsius to Fahrenheit. He saved the spatchcocked chicken carcass in a zipped freezer bag for stock making on some future date, put it in the freezer.

Dinner had been a surprisingly pleasant meal. Hux had expected Kylo Ren to complain about something following the afternoon’s lunch, where he had picked out every single olive from his salad, but he ate everything on his plate this time around and asked for seconds afterwards.

The conversation had remained chiefly on the subject of Phasma’s chore roster, which she had drawn on a refrigerator-mounted dry-erase board. 

“Since this is the twenty-first century,” Phasma had said, “I am going to split the chores three ways starting Monday morning. I’ll take two days, you two take two each, and we’ll leave Sunday as a day of rest.” Hux volunteered for Mondays and Thursdays, Phasma took Tuesday and Wednesday, and that left Friday and Saturday for Kylo Ren, which was just as well, he thought. It left him options if Ren’s cooking was as disastrous as his arrival had been earlier that morning. 

“Can you even cook?” Hux had asked him, and Ren had looked up from his half-empty plate. 

“Yes?” he said, and something in his tone left Hux vaguely doubtful. “I spent the past eight years being an overeducated college student,” Ren continued, “I can manage housekeeping.” 

“Good,” Phasma said. She popped another slice of carrot in her mouth, chewed and swallowed. 

“Where did you go to school?” Hux asked, genuinely curious. The eight years of university that Ren had described alluded to postgraduate work or a professional degree. He had not yet learned much about Kylo Ren besides his fondness for automotive excess and his superb drawing skills. And that he purported to play bass. 

Ren shrugged. “I took my BFA in studio art at Cornell, did my M.Arch at MIT. I had accepted a paid internship at a firm in Boston, but then I got this job instead.” That explained Ren’s point of origin in Boston, the quality of his draftsmanship and art history knowledge and his new job as architect for the CIA’s dreamshare initiative. 

It also explained, Hux thought as he glanced at Ren again, the dramatic all-black wardrobe and the chipped black nail polish on his fingernails, the exaggerated billow of his hair. He had dressed like an art student, and the nail polish probably hid the lines of ink and charcoal that would accumulate under his nails as he worked. A brief dalliance with fountain pens had taught Hux that some things would remain under one’s nails no matter how hard one scrubbed. It had also taught him that fountain pens did not play well with pressurized aeroplane cabins unless one had an interest in burning money, which he did not, no matter what his sartorial interests implied. 

“We are all smart people here,” Phasma said with a brief smile. “Except for the fellow with the Brass Rat over there.” Phasma alluded to the MIT class ring, and Hux had to fight the urge to smile. Phasma, being a Caltech graduate, would naturally hew to her school’s storied rivalry with MIT. Hux felt that he had probably enjoyed her jibe a little more than was graceful, but a stiff upper lip hid a multitude of sins. 

“Actually, I don’t own a Brass Rat. And what’s so bad about MIT?” Kylo Ren asked, roast chicken forgotten for the moment.

“Don't forget I went to Caltech,” Phasma shrugged, “You know, the better, sexier institute of technology.” 

Ren rocked back in his chair. “Oh, you’re one of _those people,_ ” he said. “What about you, Hux?”

“Cambridge,” Hux said, hoping that his alma mater would at least imply his neutrality in the rivalry, being above such things. (Except, of course, when the other university was Oxford.)

Phasma stabbed at a mushroom slice with her fork but did not eat it. “Hux is the only one here who answers to Doctor, unlike us lesser mortals,” she said, and Hux saluted her with his wineglass. “How does an architect find himself at MIT anyway?” she asked Ren. 

Ren shrugged as he cut himself another morsel of chicken. “They have one of the best architecture programs in the US, and they said they’d cover all my textbooks and give me a materials stipend. Yale didn’t.” 

“Nice,” Phasma said, and silence reigned briefly over the dinner table as they all returned to their dinners. 

Kylo Ren insisted on taking care of the dishes after dinner, even though the roster did not officially begin until Monday, and Hux went into his room feeling fairly pleasant, or at least he did until he heard the sounds of Ren tuning his bass through the thin drywall separating their rooms. _Just bayonet me now and put me out of my misery,_ he thought, as he looked up noise-cancelling headphones online.

\---

They established a brittle routine Monday morning – Hux and Phasma woke at the same time, but she preceded him to the kitchen and started the coffee while he took the time to brush his teeth, shower and shave. That done, he knocked hard on Kylo Ren’s bedroom door just to make sure he did not sleep through his own morning alarm, and then went downstairs to take care of breakfast. Hux’s hard rap on Ren’s door had been satisfyingly rewarded with a muffled “I’m awake, I’m awake!” through the door. He had smiled then, pettily pleased with having irritated Kylo Ren, even if the relative irritation had been miniscule compared to how he had felt that Saturday morning when Ren had first arrived.

On workdays Hux favored muesli with fruit and yoghurt and a hard-boiled egg for protein, and that was what he did this morning. He sliced one of the plums he had bought at the grocers’ Saturday, placed the golden segments on top of his muesli in a bowl before he spooned yoghurt over its contents. He also sliced a bagel and pulled two extra eggs out of the refrigerator. The bagel was for Phasma; the hard-boiled eggs, which he had cooked, cooled and shelled Sunday afternoon, were there in case she and Ren wanted them as well. Hux finished by putting Phasma’s bagel in the little oven-toaster she kept on the kitchen counter and setting the timer. He then brought his muesli and egg to the dining table, and then returned to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. 

Phasma joined Hux at the dining table shortly after he had started on his bowl of muesli, just as he realized that he missed the _Guardian’s_ cryptic crossword. He had been in the habit of filling his out over breakfast, and its absence would be something he would have to get used to for the duration of his assignment in the US. She was wearing a marvelous pearl-gray pinstripe suit that seemed to glow faintly in the early morning light, pocket square a gleaming edge of scarlet against the breast pocket, and Hux noticed the nipped-in waist on her suit jacket, noted the way the pinstripes lined up perfectly despite the obvious alterations to its fit. 

“You have a wonderful tailor,” he told her as she sat down with her toasted bagel on a plate, with cream cheese, sliced ham and the hard-boiled egg beside it. She held a cup of coffee in her other hand, black. Hux took his with cream, unsweetened. 

“Thank you,” Phasma said as she pulled a banana off the hand in the table’s fruit bowl; “That’s high praise coming from you.” 

Hux nodded in acknowledgement, although he felt that his tall, slim figure was not one that was ever particularly difficult by sartorial standards in any way. Phasma, on the other hand, with her slender waist and insistence on a closer fit, would simply take more skill to tailor and alter a suit for. 

“Where did you get this one?” he asked out of curiosity. Hux did not spend much time on the ready-to-wear end of menswear, but he admired the suit’s original lines in context of her tailor’s careful alterations.

“Hugo Boss,” Phasma put her coffee cup down after a grateful sip. “I had it taken in to fit me at Bindle and Keep in NYC.” He glanced at the crimson slash of her pocket square again, realized that it matched her lipstick and smiled. The world, he felt, would be a more interesting place if more women pushed the boundaries of menswear like this. 

There was a soft thumping of footfalls then, and Phasma turned her head leftward to glance at the stairwell as a pair of boots descended the stairs to the ground floor. The rest of Kylo Ren followed, and Hux had to admit that he had actually cleaned up his act somewhat, compared to what he had worn over the weekend. Ren now wore a slim-fitting two-button suit jacket with notched lapels in a severe black wool. The matching flat-front trousers were tailored so closely that Hux wondered if Ren’s tailor had had to make allowance for dress provision when altering it to fit him. Underneath his suit jacket he wore a black Joy Division t-shirt, its front striated with the distinctive white lines from the album cover of _Unknown Pleasures_ , the last radio emissions from a dying star.

Several thoughts passed through Hux’s mind as Ren passed him on the way to the kitchen, revealing the double vents in the suit jacket’s tail. The first thing was that the suit looked like a Zegna and that he wanted to see Kylo Ren wear more Zegna. The second was that this was probably the most formal thing that Kylo Ren had ever deigned to wear, and that he had probably bought this for job interviews. The third was that the t-shirt was perhaps good news; their tastes in everything else might vary widely, but at least they could agree on the bass lines of Peter Hook. 

Following all that was a wave of baffled confusion as Ren joined Hux and Phasma at the table with his cup of coffee and a large bowl of children’s cereal. Pink bits of corn cereal floated in a bowl of milk, liberally studded with pink marshmallows. The boiled egg that Hux had left on the counter for Ren would be the healthiest thing in this meal, if he ate it. 

Hux was not in the habit of issuing medical advice – it wasn’t as though he still practiced medicine despite his being on the register – but a part of him wanted to grab Ren by those narrow lapels and shake him while yelling, “DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT SHITE DOES TO YOUR PANCREAS?”

“This is the last of my Frankenberry,” Ren said conversationally to no one in particular as he ate his first spoonful of sugar-soaked cereal. “No more until next Halloween.” The black nail polish on his nails was now fresh, shiny and smooth as automotive paint.

 _Americans,_ Hux thought as he sighed into his cup of coffee. This cultural shock was going to take a lot of getting used to, and the freelance human disaster zone slurping pink milk off his spoon would take even more. 

The last thought that ran through his mind as he returned to his breakfast was that if, after eight years in the brightest halls of American academia, Kylo Ren had learnt so little about adulting that he would still willingly consume anything with the prefix _Franken-,_ Hux was going to have to try very hard to find as many Friday night dinner invitations as he could.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hux instructs Kylo Ren in the secrets of the sartorialist. Ren shows Hux what the inside of his mind looks like. Phasma shows them what it's like to be shot with a submachine gun. 
> 
> And somewhere in there, Hux realizes that he does in fact like Ren very much. He doesn't want to.
> 
> \---
> 
> Content warning for homophobia and physical abuse of a minor. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You knew there was going to be a Smiths lyric somewhere, so it might as well be the best one.

Hux’s first day of work at Langley started out as routine. Boring, even. He had carpooled to work with Phasma and Kylo Ren, and for some reason she had put her laptop bag in the front seat, forcing Hux to share the back seat with Ren. At least Ren was not an obnoxious fellow-passenger, although Hux had glanced at those long legs in those narrow trousers to his right and thought that Ren might have been more comfortable in the front seat. 

Phasma had taken the George Washington Memorial Parkway after they had crossed the Potomac River from Maryland, and then turned into the private road leading to 1000 Colonial Farm Road in McLean, Virginia. From there it was a short drive to employee parking, and a short walk from employee parking to the entrance. 

Hux bypassed the security check using his temporarily issued credentials, as did Phasma, but Ren had been stopped at the metal detector. Hux had watched him remove his boots – big, ridiculous goth boots with chromed buckles up the ankles, and he had stared in vague disbelief when it registered that Ren had paired a Zegna suit with those boots and a Joy Division t-shirt. For work. The sheer audacity required would have irritated Hux had Ren not somehow made the choice work so well. 

Ren's socks were something else Hux had not anticipated in any way – black ones with bright, cheerful pink hearts all over them in a repeating pattern, drawing everyone's attention to his long narrow feet as he padded through the scanner. Hux had the vague feeling that the pink was probably the only color in Ren’s outfit today, and in fact the only bright colour Hux had so far seen in a wardrobe that appeared to be wholly devoted to variations on black. 

The effect was surprisingly intimate, personal, to have all that forbidding, unrelenting black parted temporarily to reveal that shocking color. Hux had applied similar reasoning to his choice in waistcoats and braces, and it rocked him a little to realize that Ren had done the same, except with less formality and more verve.

And then Ren had smirked at Hux as he reached for his boots. "You can stop staring," he said, as he bent to buckle his boots back on, this time leaving the hems of his narrow trousers scrunched above the boots’ bulky tops. The buckles caught the light as he tied the laces back up and straightened, winked as he stepped by Hux to follow Phasma to their orientation session, left Hux in the wake of his passage, still wondering where his usually quick wits had gone.

\---

They sat through two briefings and a slideshow before lunch, and were handed hefty orientation packets before they were all shown to Phasma’s office, a large, institutional-looking room that held two more desks, a craft station and a professional-grade drafting table, one with a built-in monitor arm and a pull-out keyboard tray. IT had already been by and left their work laptops and phones on their desks. Hux was pleased to find his desk broad and its drawers smooth and capacious, but he opened the orientation packet with a faint sense of trepidation – nobody in Langley seemed to be capable of writing any kind of summary, and he felt that he could have remained in London if all they had wanted to do was put him through endless rounds of meetings. He would at least still have had someone to fuck, even if he hadn’t been all that attached to his ex in the first place.

He pulled his new, permanent employee ID out of the envelope, and sighed explosively. “Oh, Christ.”

“What?” Phasma asked. “Have they spelled it wrong?”

“No.” Hux waved it at her. “They’ve put the wrong bloody name on it, is what they’ve done. All the rest of my ID says William Ellis, just as it’s meant to, passport, credit cards and all. And they’ve just gone and put my real name on this and made this whole Ellis charade completely pointless.”

Ren scooted over on his desk chair to get a closer look. “How’re you supposed to pronounce that?” he said, peering curiously at the official spelling of Hux’s first name, Bhreandáin, as it was on his birth certificate.

“Brendan,” Hux said shortly. “Bren, if you like.”

“So you’re Irish?” Ren raised an eyebrow. “You don’t _sound_ Irish.”

“My mother was from County Donegal. I am English.” Hux stared down Ren’s eyebrow. “And let’s get all of this out of the way first off: yes, I speak Irish; no, I’m not a Catholic, anymore; no, I don’t particularly drink Guinness; and if anyone should ask me if I am after their Lucky Charms, I shall _find_ a shillelagh for the express purpose and pleasure of beating their head in. Are we clear.” He didn’t phrase it as a question.

Ren burst out laughing. “I like you when you’re angry, Bren.”

“Never mind,” Phasma said, a smile lurking in the corner of her mouth. “I’ll have a chat with HR and see if we can’t get it sorted. In the meantime I suppose you’d better wear it, but try to avoid introducing yourself too widely if you’re really concerned about the Ellis cover.”

“Thank you.” Hux watched Ren fish his ID out of his envelope, and noted sourly, “So good of them to get yours right at least.”

 _Ren, Kylo_ clipped his shiny new badge to his lapel and smiled. “I go by my workname more often than not - it seems to help.”

It occurred to him that he didn’t actually know any other name for Ren. Phasma had never mentioned one.

He distracted himself from his irritation with the inefficiencies of bureaucracy by going through his laptop bag to see if IT had given him a charger cable for his new phone. Amazingly enough, they exceeded his newly lowered expectations; not only was there a cable, but the phone was fully charged when he turned it on. He tucked it into his suit jacket’s inner pocket.

“When do I get my gun?” Ren asked Phasma. “Wait, do I get a gun? Bren’s got a gun. You’ve got a gun. I think I should get a gun.”

“Hux brought his over with him - he already holds all the certifications he needs. You’ll have to pass your own range certifications before the Agency will issue you a firearm,” Phasma said. “Didn’t you read the fine print? You have 90 days to get certified and pass all your training if you want to keep your contract.”

Hux remembered the way the muscles in Ren’s upper arms had tensed under the sleeves of his t-shirt as he had carried his bass and amplifier up the stairs. He thought that the training wouldn’t be that much of a problem for Ren as long as he stopped eating junk food like that luridly pink breakfast cereal he had indulged in earlier in the day. Then he wondered at what point he had begun spending so much time considering Kylo Ren's arms. 

“When are we going to meet Snoke?” Ren asked as he adjusted the tilt of his drafting table. Dr. John Snoke was currently the head of Langley’s current dreamshare research and initiative, and he had yet to make an appearance in the briefings they had sat through. 

“After lunch,” Phasma said. “You’ll probably be going under for the first time then, too.” 

“It’s almost lunch, isn’t it?” Ren asked hopefully. He had not taken to wearing a watch yet. 

“Yeah. Wanna check out the cafeteria together?” she asked as she got up from her desk. She had been here long enough for her desk to start looking lived-in, despite its lack of clutter. There were no family or significant other photographs, however. Not even a potted plant. It had only been the stationery supplies on her desk that suggested it had a current occupant. 

“Sure. I want to get a look at _Kryptos,_ ” Ren said, referring to the infamous encrypted sculpture. Nobody had yet cracked the fourth message in it, although Hux suspected that Ren’s interest in it was more artistic than cryptological. 

“We can get a seat near it, yes. Coming along, Hux?” Phasma asked. 

“Yes, of course,” Hux said, joining them out of inertia rather than personal inclination. He had always been a solitary sort of individual, but it would be nice to have somebody to complain to in case the food at the cafeteria disappointed. Besides, he had started to like Phasma quite a lot, and was willing to put up with Ren for the sake of her company.

\---

Hux was pleased enough with his chicken caesar salad - it was fairly good for something that had come out of an institutional cafeteria. Phasma had chosen a table close to to the courtyard doors, as promised, and Kylo Ren had stared fascinated at _Kryptos_ in between bites of pizza and swigs of chocolate milk. At least Ren’s enormous pizza slice had vegetables on it - its broad cheesy surface was liberally studded with green pepper slices, mushroom halves and the sad black rings of cardboard-tasting canned olives.

Hux could not help but feel a little insulted when Ren ate those without hesitation. The Kalamata olives he had bought for his salad had been perfectly delicious, whereas these things probably tasted like they had met an olive coming down the street once and waved to it along the way. He had been on the verge of asking Ren about his aversion to flavor, but Ren spoke first. 

“Hey, Bren, can I ask you a favor?”

Hux looked sidelong at Ren. “What is it?”

“Um. I've been looking around, and the dress code here’s a lot more formal than what I’m used to." That was hardly a surprise. "And this -” Ren gestured at the suit he was wearing, “- this is okay, but it's... I got it for job interviews. It’s the only one I own." Ren looked like he knew he should be embarrassed to admit to that in the company of Bren Hux. "So I was wondering if you would help me. I want to go out after work and pick up some things but I don’t really know where to start and I'm... pretty out of my element. Can you point me in the right direction? Just, like. Show me what I should be looking for. So I don’t buy anything too wrong."

Well now. Hux took another bite, and chewed to cover how fast he was thinking. What an interesting proposition - but one for which he was completely unprepared. 

“I don’t know if I can do it tonight, Ren,” Hux said, trying to buy himself some time. “I’m on the chore roster for Monday. And why me? I don't know D.C. at all.”

“I can just get some sushi if you’re going out together,” Phasma shrugged, before Ren could answer. She sipped at her iced tea after, paused. Hux had the slight suspicion that she was trying to set them up. Although whatever effort she might put in was likely futile; Ren had to be straight, judging from the car he owned. 

“Come on, Hux, you know why you - because you’re the best-dressed person I’ve ever seen, here included.” Ren said, after another quick glance around the cafeteria. “There are some people in nice suits, but none of the guys really have a coherent, personal sense of aesthetic like you do. They’re all kind of... bland. But you - you choose your cufflinks, your ties, your waistcoat, everything, to work with everything else. You know what you're doing with this stuff. And I? Do not. And anyway, it doesn't matter if you know D.C. Even I can Google stockists, but I can't Google the kind of knowledge you've got.” 

Hux blinked, amused by the accuracy of Ren's statements, and more flattered than he quite wanted to admit. He supposed it stood to reason. Ren had been an artist before he had become an architect, and he possessed an excellent eye. Of course he would notice. But - hold on. “What happened to calling me Bren?”

“It sounds weird when you’re still calling me Ren.” Ren shrugged again, smiled, and Hux surprised himself by smiling too.

"I suppose I'm not used to first names," he admitted. "I've been just Hux all my life to one degree or another. Boarding school. Medical school. Vauxhall. One loses the habit. Would you rather I called you Kylo?" 

The name felt odd and foreign on his tongue, too familiar, and Ren laughed. "Well, normally, yes, but you look so uncomfortable. Do what you want. I don’t mind as long as it's not 'hey you'." 

"So. You wish to put yourself entirely in my hands, Kylo Ren." He heard that sentence as he said it, and wanted to take it back, but there was nothing for it. 

Ren fixed his huge dark eyes on Hux. "You can dress me like a doll," he said earnestly, "if that's what it takes for me to stop thinking Security's gonna throw me out of here."

Hux gave up. Faced with an offer like that, he was simply not strong enough. No mortal could be. "Very well,” he said. “I’ve put in a request for a work vehicle and I should have it by this evening. If you’re up to it, I can take you suit shopping, and you can get me dinner so we’re even. Is that agreeable to you?” 

“Yeah,” Ren said, his smile wide and shy and childish at the same time. “That sounds good.” 

“You are in for such an education, Ren,” Phasma smiled. “Everything that Hux wears is probably bespoke, antique, or couture. Mostly Savile Row, isn’t it?” 

“Exactly,” Hux smiled, pleased she'd noticed. “But we needn't go so far as all that to begin with. I will see you decently dressed, Ren. Maybe even find you something with color in it.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Ren said, seriously this time, and Hux could not help but smile at his earnest devotion to looking like a postmodern Lord Byron. Some style was better than no style, after all. But - challenge accepted. He’d seen those socks. It could be done.

\---

Phasma led them even further into the building after lunch, to a set of windowless underground rooms set up with several lawn chairs, a workbench, a dry-erase board on castors, and a few chairs. Sitting on the workbench was a large aluminum briefcase, a few dry-erase markers, and a small set of tools - Phillips-head screwdriver, wire-stripping pliers, a soldering gun, a roll of solder.

Seated on one of the hard plastic chairs was an older man in horn-rimmed glasses, his skin pale and papery from age and too much time spent indoors and underground. Both of the lenses in his spectacles were prescription lenses, from the distorting effect they had, but his right eye was covered by a black eyepatch. A broad, ragged scar ran from his brow, above the ruined eye, to the cheek below, and his remaining eye was deep, sunken. 

Hux knew him instantly. This was Dr. John Snoke, also known as Dr. Jan van der Snoek, formerly of the Netherlands, now currently a naturalized American citizen. Vauxhall had passed Hux some supplementary reading on the CIA’s dreamshare experts before he had left London, and Snoke had featured prominently in some of those dossiers. 

He had worked on the original DARPA dreamshare initiatives nearly 30 years ago - the experiments first conceived as an avenue in speed-training soldiers and operatives covertly. An accidental discovery in a training exercise demonstrated dreamshare’s potential for espionage, allowing operatives to heist ideas and classified information in shared dreams. That initiative had gone nowhere, however, until recently when advances had allowed for the requisite equipment to be miniaturized in portable form, and Hux, Ren and Phasma would be the Agency’s first field dreamshare operatives. 

Ren had glanced a little nervously at Phasma, and then taken one of the chairs arranged to face Snoke as Hux had come up behind him. Hux took the chair to his right, and Phasma shut the door and turned its lock before she came to sit next to Hux. 

“Thank you, Nicole,” Snoke said. His voice was calm, a deeper bass than Kylo Ren’s impressive baritone. He adjusted his spectacles with one bony hand, studied them carefully before his gaze settled to rest on Ren. “I am very sure by now,” he continued, “that you have been briefed enough for a lifetime.” His accent was American enough, but Hux heard traces of his native Dutch in the consonants, in the fricatives. Hux also heard Ren suppress a laugh and shift slightly in his seat, read faint uneasiness in his movements. 

“I would explain further, but most of that information is collated in another orientation packet that I will give you before you leave. Better to show you instead, I think,” Snoke continued. He got easily up from his chair and crossed to the worktable, popped the briefcase open. “I ask that you relocate yourselves over here. Choose a lawn chair each, please.”

Hux stood up and saw that the briefcase held machinery of some kind - a custom infusion pump, round sockets for glass vials. Snoke tugged out a custom IV line - one paired with a wire running parallel to it - that terminated in a cannula and a hair-fine needle. He took off his suit jacket and left it on the worktable, rolled his right sleeve up before he put on a pair of blue sterile nitrile gloves.

“Before we commence,” Snoke said, “I need to confirm with you, Kylo Ren, that you’ve done your homework.” 

“I built and visualized that memory palace you asked me to, yes,” Ren said. His t-shirt had left his arms bare once he had taken his jacket off, and he shifted uncomfortably up the lawn chair until he could settle his back against the reclining backrest. 

“Excellent,” Snoke smiled, his manner avuncular. “Your dossiers all inform me that you are not allergic to iodine or latex. Please correct me if that information is wrong.”

A memory palace, Hux thought, remembered. The method of loci had been a mnemonic device mentioned in Greek and Roman treatises, a way to store and catalogue pertinent information in a spatial construct in one’s own head. One visualized a house, a mansion, a set of rooms in the mind, and gave them all salient spatial features, then associated each room with different sets of memories that could then be retrieved by walking through this palace and going to the specific room that held the memory sought for. 

This explained why an architect was necessary for the team - the intravenous hookups on the device explained Hux’s presence, as physician and chemist, and Phasma, naturally, was the point woman and lead operative on the team. Hux took off his own jacket and removed his left cufflink, pocketed it before he rolled his own sleeve up. 

“The lines are replaceable,” Snoke said as he tied a tourniquet around Ren’s arm, felt his forearm for veins. “Sterile. Proprietary.” He swabbed at Ren’s pale skin with an iodine swab, and then placed the line smoothly and easily, and then held the cannula in place with a tether attached to the line itself. The tourniquet came off after that, smooth and easy like a phlebotomist’s routine in a blood drive. 

“You will all notice,” Snoke continued as he changed his gloves, moved on to Phasma and hooked her up, “that there are two lines. One is for intravenous administration of somnacin, the active pharmaceutical component that triggers immediate, lucid dreaming in a subject on administration. The other is a wire allowing the hardware in the PASIV Device - the Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous Device - to begin the process of dream sharing.”

“This, Dr. Hux, is why you were seconded for the team. The efficacy of somnacin can vary from subject to subject, and it is often necessary to supplement the dosage with sedative use to prevent subjects from waking up in an untimely fashion. Your medical knowledge and familiarity with IV use protocols will also assist in the cleaning and maintenance of this device, and the maintenance of biosafety in the field.” That made sense, Hux thought. It was now his turn for the device, and the prick of the cannula was a tiny faint sting compared to the cold of the iodine evaporating off his skin. 

Snoke changed his gloves for a fourth time, pulled out a last line, and then swabbed his own forearm carefully. “I will join you for training sessions, until you are adequately familiar with the PASIV and its applications in the laboratory or the field.” He hooked himself up and depressed the large central button on the infusion pump, before easing himself onto another one of the lawn chairs. 

“Sweet dreams,” he said, and Hux closed his eyes and waited, waited for the gray drowsiness to kick in and pull him downward into -

\---

A library. Or, Hux thought, a library if hallways bloomed like flowers, unfurling manifold from some kind of fractal symmetry only thought of in Umberto Eco novels and some feverish Mandelbrot mandala. He found himself sitting at a carved wooden bench set between two large shelves, a warm golden sunlight flooding in from tall arched windows to warm his back and shoulders through the wool of his suit jacket. Books of all types and ages gleamed dully from the old oaken shelves, paperbacks, hardbacks, magazines, leather-bound volumes, newspapers. Hux glanced over the spines curiously - noticing particularly how the books seemed to blur together until he focused in on a specific title, which then sharpened and leapt into specificity.

It pulled at his mind, how real and tactile and convincing this place felt, and yet how it clearly did not obey the dictates or limitations of physical space and Euclidean geometry. It was disorienting and beautiful, like staring up into the roof in the nave of the Sagrada Família, and Hux was taken aback at the complexity of this space, paradox bleeding into folly bleeding into impossibility. 

It hit him in a staggering wave, a total realignment of his assumptions up until now. This was how Kylo Ren really thought - a palpable prodigious genius that had been there all along behind all those layers of maddeningly childlike behavior, that wild spontaneity and sheer aggravating verve.

There was a fragrance, spicy and musty, of old leather and dust, ageing ink and ancient paper that reminded him of the Old Library at St. John’s College in Cambridge, and oddly enough, of the boy he had been seeing then. Adrian had been a student of literature and poetry, all wild dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses, prone to passionate Shelley-fuelled declamations of his love delivered as often amongst the study carrels as later, in bed, with his long slim hands tracing the angles of Hux's body. Hux, swayed by his fervor and excited to be so pursued, had come terribly close to loving him back. And then Adrian had abruptly left him and taken up with someone else he had met at a poetry slam - an open mic night that Adrian had taken Hux to as his date, no less. He had sworn off the artistic types after that.

Hux got up from his bench, stood up to watch the people in the library. There weren’t many patrons, but he was a little surprised to see them. He somehow had not expected anyone’s memory palace to be occupied by random passersby. 

“What do you think?” Hux turned at the question, saw Kylo Ren coming around the shelves to his right with Phasma behind him. Ren was smiling shyly, practically glowing with excitement, searching Hux's face for opinions. As though he really cared what Hux, a doctor, the least qualified to comment on this, would think of his beautiful confection of painstaking reality and perfect fiction. It was completely disarming. 

“It’s.” Hux was bereft of words. He stared up into the complexity of the vaulted ceiling, into the hallways that should rightly have ended in intersections were this not a dream. “It's astonishing. I don’t know how this can be so real,” he breathed, softly. He was still disoriented by the spatial impossibility of this place, but focusing on individuals - on himself, on Ren and Phasma, that helped. Although focusing on Ren brought its own set of problems. 

“Me neither,” Ren murmured thoughtfully. “At first I came up with something kind of ordinary, you know?” he mused, “and then I realized, if all this was going to take place in a dream, then I didn’t really have to care about what an engineer was going to yell at me if I put a service entry cable right through a support column.”

“I hope you don’t slip up and try to do that when we’re awake,” Phasma said, her tone light and flippant. “How long did this take you?”

“About two weeks,” Ren said, glancing around at his own fantastical creation, dark eyes full of wonder. “Coming up with just the building was about two or three days. Filling it with books, furniture, memories and keeping it consistent? That took longer.” 

“I’ll say,” Phasma turned around to glance at the library patrons, spotted Snoke standing between a pair of shelves across the central aisle. “There he is.” She wove through the crowd to join him, and Hux noticed that Snoke was younger, more vital in the dream, his right eye whole and intact. 

_We are perceiving him as he sees himself,_ Hux realized, felt a strange giddy wrench of disorientation as he looked down at his own hands and glanced briefly at the cufflinks on his shirt. _Or am I perceiving him this way because I knew what he looked like as a younger man?_ Each possibility opened up entire branching webs of supposition and inference. 

_Do I look to the others how I wish to be seen,_ Hux thought, _or do they see me how they wish to see me?_ It was fascinating and bewildering all at once, and just a little uneasy no matter what the answer was. Hux had never given much thought to his own dreams, preferring mostly to tamp them down and keep them away from his waking moments, and it bothered him slightly that others would now be privy to the contents of his subconscious.

\---

“What you see here are, more or less, the contents of Kylo Ren’s subconscious mind,” Snoke told them as they sat in one of the imaginary library’s private study rooms.

“People included?” Ren asked, glancing through the glass door into the stacks beyond. His gaze was intent, curious as he studied the figments of his memory and imagination as though seeing it all afresh.

“People included. They are - hm,” Snoke pursed his thin lips briefly, “they are projections of the subconscious. Everything in this library that is not just furniture and setting - the books and the patrons - is drawn from memory.” 

Hux looked at the grain on the surface of the wooden table he sat at, closed his eyes, tried to remember what it looked like. “How is everything so detailed?” 

“These details come out from visual memory,” Snoke shrugged, “Most people believe they cannot remember that much, but they do. It is only that they are not trained to access it efficiently and reliably. Artists and architects do, as it is required for their vocations. The rest of us, not so much.” 

“Is this why you need me for this?” Ren asked. “To build the dreams we share?” 

“Not the dreams specifically,” Phasma said. “Think of the architect as the person who sets the stage, puts the props in.” 

“Right,” Ren’s brow furrowed briefly, and then he looked up sharply in sudden realization. “This means that if you or Hux or somebody else in this shared dream looked up one of the books in this library,” he said excitedly, “that you’d be able to access my memory from there.”

“Exactly,” Snoke smiled. He seemed proud of his new protegé’s quick mind and architectural skill.

“Which means,” Hux said as he realized the import of Ren’s realization, “that what we’re doing is setting a stage for someone to put their thoughts into. And then we break in and steal it, or interrogate it, or copy it from a book.” 

“That’s pretty much the gist of it,” Phasma said.

“How do we not bring our own baggage with us?” Ren asked then. “I set the stage, I build the world of the dream, and then I fill it up with my memories. What about when I’m in someone else’s dream? Wouldn’t I also bring some of that with me?”

“Normally, yes,” Snoke said. “Part of the training process that you will undergo will involve learning to suppress your own projections and keep your memories private. You will also learn how to alter someone’s dreams without alerting their subconscious to your interference, and how to tell shared dreams from reality.” 

“What happens when someone’s subconscious notices what we’re doing?” Hux asked. He guessed that the answer was nothing good. 

Phasma shrugged. “Watch this.” She reached under the table suddenly and pulled, out of nowhere, a large briefcase, popped it open to reveal a H&K MP-5K submachine gun. Hux was fairly sure the briefcase had not been there before, watched as she unfolded the stock and settled it against her shoulder, foregrip in her off-hand. She reached up with a thumb and forefinger, and set the select-fire switch from safe to full-auto (Safe to Fun, Hux’s trainers had joked), before she fired a short four-round burst into the wall of the study room. 

The report was still deafening, and Hux saw but did not hear the ejected brass bouncing on the granite flagstones. Everyone in the library was now staring in Phasma’s direction, their heads turning as though they were controlled by some outside force. The fixity of those stares was unnerving. 

“That’s creepy,” Ren managed to say as Hux’s temporary deafness started to fade. “Can’t I turn that off?” 

“It’s your subconscious, Ren,” Phasma said, shrugged again. “You can’t tell it to do that any more than you can tell your kidneys to temporarily stop making pee.”

“What happens if you keep going?” Ren glanced at the bullet holes in the wall, and out at the people still staring at Phasma. 

“They will try to eject us from your mind,” Snoke said, calmly, “like an immune system within dreams. We are the intruders here. Pathogens, if you will.” 

“They can’t eject me from my own mind,” Ren frowned.

“No,” Phasma shook her head, adjusted her grip on the MP-5, “but they can certainly get rid of the rest of us. It’s rarely pretty.” 

“So how do we wake up, then?” Hux asked her. “Assuming we’ve completed our objectives. Do we have to sit around until we wake up, or?” 

Phasma glanced at Snoke, who nodded gravely, once before she turned the MP-5 on Hux, aimed it carefully. “Rise and shine.” The last thing he saw was her finger tightening on the trigger, and Hux could only think, _this is a dream. I am not about to be sho-_

\---

Hux sat up hard in the lawn chair, his heart pounding against his sternum. It took him a moment to recover his equilibrium, and he realized that he had shouted himself awake, nearly tipped himself out of his seat.

A few seconds later Kylo Ren gasped convulsively and twitched himself awake in the chair across from Hux, his feet kicking up reflexively as he woke. Phasma, by contrast, simply opened her eyes calmly, with a deep breath. 

“You shot Hux,” Ren spluttered at her, disbelieving and horrified. “Fuck, you shot _me._ ” 

Beside him Snoke sat up and adjusted his glasses, smiled faintly. Amused. 

“First rule of shared dreaming,” Phasma shrugged as she pulled the cannula carefully away from her arm, held a sterile swab over the pin prick in her skin until the bleeding slowed. “You die in a dream, you wake up. Usually.” 

“Usually?” Hux asked, realizing that his hands were shaking slightly, tried to summon his composure. 

“Under normal field conditions, yes.” Something in Snoke’s tone did not brook argument or further inquiry. 

Hux swung his feet off the end of the lawn chair, sat sidelong as he rested his elbows on his knees, buried his face in his hands with the IV line still hanging from his left arm and concentrated on slowing his heart rate. That had to be one of the least pleasant ways he'd ever been woken up, and his body was taking a while to be convinced that he hadn't just been in mortal danger. 

“I’m sorry,” Phasma told Hux. She squeezed his shoulder gently, and then took hold of his left wrist and undid the tether for the IV line, pulled the cannula free with a gentle tug. Her hands were cool and careful, and the touch grounded him slightly as she capped the cannula end of the line. “You asked.”

“Right,” Hux managed to say when he opened his eyes again. 

“Fucking hell, Phasma,” Ren whispered, wild-eyed and shivering, long fingers whitening against his upper arms as he hugged himself, a reassurance and a barrier. Hux saw the goose bumps on on his skin, and realized that he was headed towards a state of emotional shock. That wouldn't do. 

“I’m not injured, Ren,” Hux said, trying to sound reassured and reassuring. He stood up and walked over to Ren, without thinking reached out and took him gently by the shoulders. “We were only dreaming.”

“I -” Ren took a deep shaky breath and swallowed, stared up at Hux, his eyes troubled. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone shot like that before."

Of course he hadn't. That wasn't a normal part of an M.Arch. Nor had it ever been a job requirement, as it had for himself and Phasma. Suddenly he felt rather sorry for Ren: poor little art student, tossed in at the deep end with only the CIA and Vauxhall's prized sharks for company.

“I’m all right. Really,” Hux said, and meant it more this time. He could feel the adrenaline fading, felt his mind start to work belatedly on all the information he had received since he had woken. 

Snoke leaned over Ren’s arm, freed him from the IV line. “You will get used to it in time,” he said. Ren remained silent, but Hux could feel the tension easing slightly from his shoulders, and gave him another careful squeeze before letting go.

Ren looked rather as though he wished Hux would come back, but Hux made himself sit down and stop looking at him. Ren would be fine. It wasn't as though he was currently terribly likely to have to watch someone actually be shot - hm. 

“That brings me to a question, Dr. Snoke,” Hux said slowly, as he felt the realization click into place. “We’ll all be armed on duty, especially in the field. What is to prevent us from mistaking dream from reality and accidentally shooting ourselves?”

“You’re going to need a totem,” Snoke said, as though that explained everything.

\---

Hux had helped Snoke change out the IV lines on the PASIV for fresh, sterile ones. The capped cannula ends snapped off the coupling on the line easily and went into a sharps container for further disposal, but the lines and wires went straight into a medical waste bin. The PASIV’s infusion pump was flushable with a sterilizer solution, and the entire mechanism could be disassembled and put into an autoclave for more thorough cleaning on a weekly or monthly basis depending on its frequency of use.

That done, Snoke had dismissed them to their own office with the relevant documentation in yet another orientation packet. “The first time under is always a little difficult,” he had said as he removed his nitrile gloves and shot them into the medical waste bin. “I will bid you all adieu for today. We will meet tomorrow for more training. In the meantime, familiarize yourselves with the orientation information.” 

Phasma had led the way out of the workroom and back up to ground level, and Hux could not help noticing the way Kylo Ren kept glancing at him, as though expecting the bulletholes to bloom, spectral and dripping in the middle of his forehead. He was still pale and twitchy, his eyes distant when they weren't on Hux. Ren was so visual, he thought, and having to watch someone die messily in dreams was probably a difficult image to dismiss. Perhaps that was why he'd seemed more upset about Phasma shooting Hux than her turning the gun on him next. It had certainly been an odd reaction. 

Hux’s personal experience and instincts told him that what Ren needed was distraction and a good stiff drink. Distraction to allow his brain to process the trauma and the unreality of the situation until he became used to it, alcohol as a muscle relaxant and depressant to take the edge off the adrenaline no doubt humming in Ren’s bloodstream. Hux thought again to Ren’s request for the evening, and decided that the alcohol half of the equation could at least be accomplished over dinner.

Distraction, however? Hux’s supervisor at the hospital in Reading had once accused him of having the bedside manner of a kidney pan, and he had only managed marginal success when waving a lollipop in the face of a distressed toddler. He was the wrong person to comfort anyone, least of all Ren. 

And particularly, he was beginning to have suspicions about the little feeling in his chest, just under his sternum, that suggested that he might like to try anyhow; might like to see if Ren could be induced to smile the way he had in the dream, perhaps. The feeling that suggested that smile might be quite important to Hux.

He knew that feeling, and he mistrusted it deeply. That way lay madness, and unfortunate entanglements like Adrian. There was nothing but trouble in that for him. Most especially with a coworker he _needed_ to be able to work with. 

But perhaps there was a middle ground, something that would at least take Ren’s mind off whatever it was that was keeping that awful look on his face. 

He thought of how uncertain Ren had seemed in the face of all this suited formality, his earnest declarations over lunch, and settled quickly on an approach.

“Do you wear cologne, Ren?” Hux asked, with no prior lead-up, as they exited the elevator on the third floor.

“Wh- Huh,” Ren paused in the hallway as though he were only registering Hux’s presence for the first time, and shook his thoughts away. “No.” 

“Excuse me. May I?” Hux asked, not specifying what he intended.

Ren nodded briefly, just a little too quickly to have actually pondered the question, and then Hux took a step and closed in with Ren, standing within the boundaries of his personal space. Ren stiffened slightly, but stood still as Hux leaned close to his neck, his fingertips brushing Ren’s shoulder, and inhaled, taking a deep whiff of the scent of him: soap and shampoo, laundry detergent on clean cotton and the slightly musty hint of wool hung up in a closet for too long, a slight musk and the staleness of fear underlying it all, fear and nightmare-sweat. 

“Strawberries,” Hux said after a thoughtful moment, as he stepped back to give Ren space. "Where are those coming from?" It was unexpected, as so much of Ren had been, odd but rather nice. _Like Eton mess,_ he thought, _like strawberries and cream in the summer. Appealing._

Hux pushed those thoughts aside forcibly - this was meant to be a distraction for Ren, not himself. Ren was his colleague, and only that. 

“That’s just my conditioner,” Ren said shyly as they fell back in step together. “Should I change it?”

“No.” Hux shook his head. “No, it works on you. Now we just have to find something that works with that.”

“Huh.” Ren fell silent, waited for Hux to speak again, clearly not quite understanding what this all had to do with anything. 

“The way you smell is important,” Hux explained. “It isn’t just there to hide bad odors or to afflict others’ allergies. When used properly a personal cologne or scent projects your personality and intent beyond the boundaries of your skin. It announces your presence, reinforces your absences and gives others a means by which to remember you. The sense of smell is very ancient and primordial in us humans, part of the limbic system.” Smell was an important part of human memory. Marcel Proust had used the smell and taste of madeleines dipped in a tisane to summon involuntary memory forth.

“It’s part of the uniform,” Ren said after a few silent seconds of thought. There was the faintest hint of a flush creeping up his neck above the collar of his t-shirt, but he looked less wide-eyed and less frightened with each passing second as his brain seized on the information Hux had given him. 

“Exactly,” Hux said. Phasma caught his eye as Ren preceded him into their shared office, smiled and nodded in approval at his gambit. 

“Good job,” she whispered, and Hux had nodded once in reply and acknowledgement. But he wasn't at all sure, now, with the strawberries lingering in his nose, that he hadn't just made a terrible mistake.

\---

Phasma had waited until they were all seated comfortably at their desks, their office door shut and locked behind them, before she started to explain what Snoke had meant by a “totem”.

“A totem,” Phasma said, “is a small object - one you can carry around easily on your person, something that someone would overlook as just pocket cruft if you’re searched.”

“Like a lucky rabbit’s foot?” Ren asked. He leaned heavily back in his office chair, almost back to his previous self, to the version of Ren Hux had seen before the PASIV and Phasma’s demonstration of skill with a submachine gun. 

“Perhaps. Here’s the catch. It has to be unique in some way, like -” She reached into the collar of her blouse and pulled a silken cord from around her neck. A tiny silk brocade envelope hung on the end of it, a little rectangular bag in cream and gold. “This is a charm or a talisman. They sell them at Buddhist temples in Japan, they’re really common. Like your example, Ren, the rabbit’s foot. Each one has a prayer in it and the prayers can differ. Some people pray for love. Other people pray for protection.” She tucked the little bag back down her collar, patted her blouse front as it settled in place. “Nobody knows what I’m praying for.”

“So if you’re not sure you’re in a dream,” Ren asked her, “You can check inside the envelope and make sure it’s the right prayer?”

“Yes,” Phasma said. “Nobody should ever handle your totem, because once they know its balance, or weight, its secret, then they’ll be able to insert a copy of it in a dream and use that to trick you.” 

“But how do you tell the difference, then, assuming you’re stuck in your own dream?” Hux asked her, noticing the logical problem in that assumption. 

“What I pray for in dreams is not what I prayed for in reality,” Phasma shrugged. Her expression was calm, neutral, but something in her voice suggested old pain behind her careful façade of professionalism. “Some totems do things in dreams that they cannot do in reality. Like a top that never stops spinning when its owner is dreaming. Something like that.” 

Hux nodded. “Now _that_ is an elegant solution for that problem,” he said.

Phasma smiled thinly. “Thank you, Doctor.”

\---

Hux collected his work car - a Chevy Impala with government plates, one almost exactly like the all the other government fleet cars in the greater D.C. area - and drove around to the entrance to pick Kylo Ren up. “Where are we going first?” Ren had asked him as he had shut the passenger-side door.

“Home,” Hux said. “We’re going to drop off our work laptops first. I would rather not carry them around all night, and I don’t want to have to answer to IT if either of us loses one on our shopping trip.” 

“That would be a horrible security breach of the worst kind,” Ren agreed. 

The whole car smelled of strawberries, rich and insolent, and Hux tightened his grip on the steering wheel and drove.

Phasma had gone her own way to pick up some personal groceries and the aforementioned sushi that she had wanted for dinner tonight, and she was not home when Hux climbed the stairs to his room and left his closed laptop bag on his desk. 

He’d moved his dressing case back to his room after his morning shave, though he’d left his brushes on the counter to dry, and he pulled it out of the shelf and set it on the bed. Carefully, he slid out the bottom drawer, and from one of its little niches, he extracted an ordinary-looking brass key. 

He had come back to the house to drop off his laptop, yes, but he had also wanted to pick this key up. He felt a faint shiver run down his spine as he tucked it in a trouser pocket, staring into the niche in his dressing case where it had been. In that niche was also a pair of cufflinks Hux had never worn, had saved as a reminder. 

Hux had known immediately, once he had grasped Phasma’s explanation, that he already had his totem. 

The year he had turned fourteen, he had come home to the house in Sussex for the break between Lent Half and Summer Half, a month’s break between late March and late April. His parents had been the same as always - his father bitter, resting his weight heavily on the cane that had been part of his life since the Falklands; his mother putting on a brave face and inquiring about school. 

This year had been different from the rest, however. There had been another boy his age, Ian, a new neighbor’s son. Grammar school boy. Ian’s eyes had been green like limes, his clever face surmounted by a widow’s peak of dark brown hair. His family had moved into the neighborhood while Hux had been away at Eton - their house was two down and across the street from Hux’s childhood home. Ian had been unperturbed by the neighborhood rumors about Hux’s unbearable poshness and aloofness, and he had shrugged off the adult whispers about Hux’s screaming parents with a cheeky grin. 

“It’s funny,” Ian had said when they first met, “how you can live here without being here.” 

“I live at school,” Hux had said, trying not to let the bitterness show. “This is where I come back to when there isn’t school.”

Ian had shrugged, tossed a brand new cricket ball into the air and caught it easily on the side of his bat. “Well, it’s good you’re here now, b’cos I need someone to bowl.” He had bounced the ball across to Hux, who had put his hands out automatically, and Ian had smiled as he made the catch. 

They had become friends forthwith. 

Ian’s easy manner had reassured Hux’s nervous mother, who was relieved to find her son interacting with his peers in the neighborhood, and he was popular enough that his insistence on Hux’s inclusion in his social circles was heeded. It didn’t matter that he had originally befriended Hux because he had genuinely needed a bowler on his side, or that Hux wasn’t exactly the best bowler to have come from the illustrious halls of Eton College. 

“It’s still better than not having a bowler,” Ian had shrugged over a shared bottle of lemonade. “Besides, you don’t complain as much as my sister when I ask her to bowl to me for an hour.” Hux had taken the bottle from Ian’s grimy hand then and taken a long sip without wiping the neck first, and Ian had only grinned crookedly back at him, the smile arrowing straight to Hux's core.

Hux had never thought much of love in his life. Love, to him, was something that ensnared adults into living unhappy lives with each other, tormenting each other for decades because they couldn’t part. Love was what his father claimed as justification for his withering tirades, love was why his mother didn’t fight back, love was something God was purported to have for him. Yet, as he lay awake at night listening to his parents fight in the room next to his, he realized that he loved Ian, would die for him, would do anything to have more time with him. 

Hux was also old enough, and worldly enough, to know what loving another boy meant, and the thoughts scorched the inside of his mind, swamped him in a great wave of shame and agony. He stared up into the unfamiliar white plaster ceiling above his bed and clutched at the blanket as he thought first of the priesthood and celibacy, thought of a long lonely life in the bosom of a Church that had only platitudes to offer him when he came to Confession with a black eye.

 _Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned._ Which father? God the Father, who had never raised a hand to stop dear old Dad no matter how much he had begged and bargained and prayed? Father Gregory at Mass, with his whisky breath and soft, trembling hands placing the communion wafer heavy on his tongue? Captain Andrew Hux, his father, with the cane and the bruised knuckles and bottle of gin, acid tongue and bitter heart?

None of these fathers could grant him absolution or forgiveness, and Hux had rolled over furiously in bed, queasy with fear and rage and unease. Everything he did was wrong and a sin. Everything he had ever thought of was immoral. If there was simply no way he could please any of these fathers no matter how hard he tried, then wouldn’t it simply be better to be bereft but free? He listened to his mother’s soft sobs through the wall of his room, gazed blankly through the window into the darkness beyond and listened to the wind soughing softly in the rustling trees. 

He was done with fathers, he decided, and would be for the rest of his life. He would love and be damned for it. He just hadn’t realized then how unbearable damnation would be, how its weight was something beyond even his endurance. 

Things went to hell in the third week of Hux’s short school holiday. Ian had come by his house again to ask him to bowl, and they had gone out to a green field safely distant from windows, small children, excited dogs and greenhouses. Ian had already gone through two new cricket balls since Hux had started bowling to him - one lost forever behind the broken window of Mrs. Littlejohn’s front parlour, the other one somewhere in the cracked cucumber frames of Mr. Khan’s overgrown garden. One more breakage, Ian’s mother had said, and he would have his bat confiscated for the rest of the year. 

Ian’s allowance could have probably covered another replacement ball, but it would never survive another breakage and the loss of his bat. Besides, this was his lucky bat, and a brand new one would take the most tedious knocking-in before it was fit to use. 

Hux had bowled to him for an intense, sweaty half-hour, before the air turned suddenly heavy, humid and thick. The sky darkened ominously, and they had run for the cover of a copse of trees as raindrops the size of 50p pieces fell from the clouds to splash heavily on the earth below. They were both soaked to the skin like bilge rats by the time they had managed to run all the way back to Hux’s doorstep. 

Hux had never invited anyone home before - not with his father’s slow menace in the parlor or his mother’s brittle anxiety - but he looked at Ian soaked to the skin, hair hanging wet into his eyes, broad cheeky grin still in place. Something twinged deep in his chest, and he had opened the door and led him upstairs. 

“I think some of my clothes should fit you,” Hux had said as he rummaged in his drawers for a fresh towel and a dry change of clothes, and Ian had closed and locked the bedroom door, leaned his cricket bat against the wall. 

“Ta, Bren,” Ian said as Hux handed him one of his newer shirts. His mother had bought it slightly oversize so that he would have room to grow into. Ian squirmed out of his sodden t-shirt, and Hux had averted his eyes at the sight of his bare chest and sides. He had never been so conscious of another boy’s bare skin before. Instead he pulled his towel over his head and worked at his hair, rubbed at his face until he could feel his skin glowing and left it draped over his shoulders as he worked at the muddy laces of his shoes. That done, he sat back down on his bed, his clothes still damp, and listened to the sound of the rain falling outside as Ian changed his clothing. 

“Do you think it’s going to stop?” Ian asked him, and he turned in surprise as he felt Ian’s weight sinking into the other side of his bed. He lay with his feet hanging off the foot of the bed, folded his arms behind his head as he stared up into the same ceiling Hux had gazed at during his sleepless nights here. Hux wondered what he saw in the plaster, if they saw the same shapes in it. 

“I don’t know,” Hux said, hesitantly, not daring to look at the boy he loved lying in his bed. Outside the rain continued to pour down, a heavy curtain of raindrops plashing loudly against the glass of his room’s casement window. “I think it’s going to keep going until dinner.” 

“Hm.” Ian sounded faintly disappointed, but mostly thoughtful as he swung his feet from side to side. “Bren,” he said again, after a few moments of silence, “why are you looking out of the window?” 

_Because I’m afraid if I lie down next to you, I’ll touch you,_ Hux thought, _And if I touch you, I won’t stop. And I don’t know what you’ll say if I do._ He said none of that. Instead he shrugged, and then nearly jumped out of his skin as Ian lifted his left hand and placed it gently on his back. He felt his pulse quicken, his world blur subtly, and he blinked hard as he sat very still in this moment, unwilling and unable to break the touch. 

“I like you, Bren,” Ian had continued, his words picking up speed, “I’m going to miss you when you go back to school.” 

“I like you too, Ian,” Hux had said, afraid that he would be understood and afraid also of being misunderstood. And then Ian’s hand slipped under the tail of Hux’s shirt to brush gently at the small of his back, and he froze at the contact. 

“No, you idiot,” Ian had said as Hux turned to look at him, his smile broad and infuriating and careless, “I _like_ you like you.” 

“You _like_ me,” Hux said, his world suddenly unfolding into a new configuration as he understood the import of Ian’s words.

“Yeah,” Ian smiled lazily then, and then he reached up to pull Hux’s face down to his, and their lips brushed briefly, tentatively. Ian’s hot breath sent a warmth through Hux, deep into the cold marrow of his bones, and they had kissed again, more confidently, when the door to Hux’s bedroom slammed open. 

Hux looked up, ashamed, angry, defiant, at his father drunk and broken in the doorframe, breath of gin so strong that he could smell it even from his bed. 

“Ian Stuart. I want you to get out of my house,” his dad had said, voice dangerously calm, “and never come back again.” 

Ian looked at Hux, his gaze full of pain and understanding and something else unnameable, and he had picked up his wet t-shirt and jumper, his cricket bat and ball, and thumped past Hux’s father, down the staircase. His father simply stood, gaze bright and hateful, until the sound of the slamming front door had carried back up the stairwell to Hux’s bedroom. 

Hux didn’t like to think of what happened afterwards. His flesh still twinged and ached from memory even after the two decades that had passed since it had happened. Afterwards, he had lain huddled on the floor under his window, long bruises darkening in crossed lines against the edges of his forearms, on his back and sides and shoulders while his father had smashed, again and again, at the lock and doorknob of his bedroom door with his steel-shod cane until the wood had splintered and the entire assembly fallen out onto the floor below. He heard his mother’s low wails from down the hallway, and then his father had taken up the wreckage of the lock and limped heavily away to the parlor downstairs, where he would pour himself more gin. 

All that was left was a dusting of wood splinters, chips of paint, and a single key, the key that his father had used to open the door in the first place. Hux had crawled across the floor, his blood leaving dark smears on the wood floor beneath him, and taken the key in his hand, squeezed it so hard in his fist that the teeth bit into his flesh and drew more blood. He lay curled up in the splinters, holding onto the key, and he still held it when his mother crept out of her room, still weeping, and helped him carefully to bed. 

“Oh, my Bhreandáin,” she had moaned in her soft Donegal accent as she pulled the damp blankets over him, and he had reached up to squeeze her shoulder with his good left hand. 

“It’s okay, Mum,” he told her. “Everything will be okay.” 

Hux had kept the key afterwards. He had carried it with him constantly at Eton, and after Adrian, at Cambridge too. And now he kept it in the bottom drawer of his dressing case, in the same niche as the cufflinks that had been his father's. If one looked carefully enough, they could see the small dotted line of scars in the palm of his right hand where the teeth of the key had bitten through his skin so long ago. Sometimes, when he had finished shaving, he would pick it up and hold it in his right hand, close his fingers over it and feel it nestle into his flesh and bone like another piece of a puzzle. 

He had kept it at first to remind himself of what his father had done, to keep his rage and determination fresh and strong. He had continued to keep it even after his father’s death, unable to explain why, until he had realized several years later that the key was a talisman, rather like Phasma’s own prayer, a testament to the dangers and consequences of daring to love, of the weight of damnation upon his shoulders. He would keep it now to tether himself to the waking world with the sheer weight of his guilt, plant it like an anchor in his mind. 

A charm against wishful dreaming, he thought, then sighed internally at the thought, and as if summoned, Ren was knocking lightly at the door. 

“Are you done? I’m ready to go,” he said.

“Just a moment,” Hux called, trying and failing not to sound irritated.

He roused himself slowly from memory and contemplated, instead, the difficulties of the present. Most especially, the particularly large difficulty that was waiting outside of his door.

He should have known better. Should have known what would happen if he let this maddening, fascinating man past the barriers he’d put in place - for a reason, and this was the reason, this had always been the reason. There was no use in denying that he’d already let Ren come too close, already gotten too close to Ren himself. What had he hoped to accomplish with that ridiculous sniffing stunt, apart from knowing for a fact that Ren used strawberry conditioner? What kind of a grown man even used strawberry conditioner?

No, he would have been hopelessly unsuitable as a lover, even had he not been a coworker. A housemate, as well, because what could be worse than trying to start and then inevitably end any kind of a relationship with someone you still had to look at across the breakfast table in the morning. It simply couldn’t happen, not in any format.

Could they be friends? Ren clearly wanted them to be. But he knew himself, and the quicksand on which any such friendship would be built. Perhaps. Perhaps they could. If Hux was sufficiently careful, and if it didn’t come to hurt too much that that was all they could be.

He shut the case, marshalled his face, and stepped back out into the hallway, empty now. His feet felt curiously heavy, as though invisible hands tugged still at his ankles in a bid to keep him mired in the past, and he felt numb and distant as he descended the staircase to the ground floor. 

The numbness was better, Hux thought. It was just as well if there was nothing in him to draw Kylo Ren in, to lure him with false promises of warmth and companionship Hux couldn’t deliver, until he came too close to the dangerous shallows full of rocks that surrounded his true heart.

And if he was right about how his feelings for Ren might develop - if he came, as he feared he would, as he _knew_ he would, to love him? 

It was safer this way, for Ren’s own good.

\---

Hux had done some cursory searches on his work phone and had a list of destinations on his itinerary, and he was staring numbly at Google Maps when Ren climbed into the passenger seat beside him. “Okay,” Ren said, “where are we going now?”

“Have you heard of Lubin?” Hux asked after a few minutes of silence, continued absently when he saw Ren shake his head, tousled hair gleaming in the early evening sunset. “They’re possibly one of the oldest surviving perfume houses in the world today, founded shortly after the French Revolution. They’re still making perfume today.” The facts calmed and soothed him, gave him something to think of besides the phantom ache in his forearms and shoulders and Ren sitting next to him in the passenger seat. 

“Wouldn’t that make the company two hundred years old?” Ren asked.

“Thereabouts, yes.” Hux stared at the drivers around him, sighed briefly as someone in an SUV cut him off. “I was thinking about the conditioner you use,” he continued, strenuously avoiding thoughts of Ren’s glorious hair or the soft skin on the side of his neck, “and it reminded me of one of their scents. It’s unusual to say the least - milk notes and wild apple over leather, civet and musk. I tried a sample of it once but it felt too sweet for me.” 

Hux heard Ren take a deep breath before he spoke again. “You don’t smell sweet, more like smoky? Like wood smoke, or incense. Actually it kind of reminds me of an old-fashioned _savusauna._ ” 

Hux wondered where Ren had experienced an old Finnish smoke sauna - those things were uncommon even in Finland, but he was a tiny bit gratified at Ren’s description. _Careful,_ he reminded himself, squelching the delight under a mental heel. “I don’t think I could make something sweet work,” he said, “but you could, especially since you already smell like strawberries.” 

They stopped at a little shop on U Street, a place that Hux would normally have described as an overly-twee hipster containment zone. Its furnishings and fittings were all artfully faded and artisanal-looking, the clothing in its windows perfectly and artificially aged so they looked just second-hand enough. Hux usually had no reason to step into a place like this, except that they were also the only place in D.C. that carried perfumes from the House of Lubin.

The shop clerk had smiled and batted her eyelashes at Ren and his Byronic good looks, but Hux had only smiled thinly at her until she realized he was the one who knew what to look for. 

“I’d like to try a sample of the Lubin Korrigan, please,” Hux had told her, his enunciation precise. He knew the effect his accent had on most Americans, and liked to emphasize it when circumstances warranted, such as now. 

She had brought the sample bottle and a slip of blotter paper, but Hux had only nodded at Ren and mimed turning the edge of his sleeve up. Ren pushed the sleeve of his jacket up his forearm, baring inches of pale skin, and the clerk had anointed him with the eau de parfum. 

“Just let it dry on its own,” Hux told him. “The friction from rubbing can heat up the essential oils and alter the fragrance profile.”

They had waited a few minutes for the top notes to fade a little, and Hux busied himself looking anywhere but at Ren while his fingers sought out the key in his trouser pocket. “I like it,” Ren had said, almost shyly as he took an experimental sniff at his wrist, closed his eyes to savor it. “I see what you mean about the leather.” Ren frowned slightly, inhaled a second time. “Is that _cognac?”_ he asked, extending his wrist to Hux.

Hux squeezed the key in the palm of his hand, tiny pain flaring sweaty and cold before he let it go and leaned into Ren’s wrist and the fragrance wafting off the point of his pulse. On Ren the lactone notes were slightly muted, giving way to the wild apple and musk, the boozy notes atop the leather. 

“I believe it is,” Hux said as he straightened back up, realized that the shop clerk was staring, just a little. “It smells good on you,” he shrugged, hoping to seem nonchalant. 

He wanted it, now, on Ren’s neck - wanted to dab it there, himself, in the soft place behind the angle of his jaw, and lean in. Let it bury the bloody strawberries and teach Ren what he could truly become.

“I’ll take it,” Ren said after a few more moments of thoughtful deliberation. He paid for it with a credit card, and the clerk had handed him a small paper bag containing the perfume bottle in its box, and they had headed back out to their car. 

Ren insisted on opening the box in the car, and Hux thought for a brief panicky moment that if he insisted on putting it on now, in these close quarters, Hux might actually crash the car. But he only held the art-deco inspired bottle in his hand and held the tortoiseshell cap to the light. “Even the bottle is pretty.” 

Hux thought of their next step, busied himself with negotiating the D.C. traffic. “Some people collect perfumes for the bottles,” he said, trying to make it sound as though he’d been thinking about something, anything else.

“Do you?” Ren asked. 

“Never,” Hux said.

\---

They stopped next at Dolce & Gabbana. It had amused Hux to watch the store assistant’s quick appraisal of his suit, and the brief confusion that had ensued before he had also noticed Ren and pinpointed the individual in need of a new suit.

“I have to say,” the young man had told Hux as an aside as he took Ren’s measurements, “that your suit is absolutely delicious. Where did you get it?” 

“Savile Row,” Hux said, genuinely pleased at his good eye. Besides, he was young, confident, and ridiculously beautiful, all sandy blond hair and green, green eyes. 

“Oh,” he had sighed, just a little dramatically, “well, then I can’t help _you_ much, unless you’re not really in here for a suit.” He favored Hux with a broad, slightly saucy wink, and then turned back to Ren. “You, I know just how to help. My name is Alec, by the way,” he said, before selecting three suits from one of the racks. “In case you’re interested in a little more color than you have on right now,” he told Ren, “here’s one in navy, and this other one is in midnight blue. And of course we have this one in black.”

They were all 3-piece suits with two-button jackets, single-vented in the back. They were all made of an excellent virgin wool, and were of excellent quality for off-rack menswear, Hux thought. Ren did not even deliberate. “I’ll take the black one,” he said. 

“You’re not even going to look at the tailoring?” Hux asked him. 

Ren shot Hux a confused look. “Aren’t you going to show me what to look for?” 

“Watch and learn, my apprentice, watch and learn.” Alec held the black suit up gamely while Hux pointed out the suit’s narrow notched lapels to Ren, explained the difference between the ornamental buttons on the jacket’s sleeves and bespoke surgeon’s cuffs, demonstrating with his own left sleeve. He had opened the jacket to study its lining, explained the importance of a floating canvas. “Fused canvases are acceptable enough if you’re exactly the size and shape of the mannequin the suit was fitted on,” Hux said, “but it limits your alteration options if you are not, in fact, shaped like that.” 

“Besides,” Alec had piped up, “the waistcoat is something you can leave off in warmer weather, but it’s good to have if you want it. And the fly on the trousers is a French fly closure.” He held up the waistband on the matching pair of flat-front trousers and flipped the fly edge open to reveal the extra button sewn onto the waist stay. “This takes a lot of the tension off the top of the zipper, so it won’t bunch up when you sit down.” 

Ren had listened intently, absorbing the details, before Alec had sent him off to the changing room to test its fit. “So, is that Ren fellow your boyfriend, uh?” he asked Hux.

“Will,” Hux said, using his workname. “And he’s just a coworker who direly needed my help.” 

“I don’t know if he needs that much help from you,” Alec mused thoughtfully. “That Zegna is fierce.”

“It’s his only suit,” Hux sighed, glad to at least be talking to someone who understood sartorial matters, “and I think his mother chose it for him.”

“Ohh,” Alec had said, and nothing more had needed to be said. 

Ren had come out of the changing room looking like a slightly rumpled million dollars. The sleeve length needed minor alterations, and Ren’s slender build would support more waist suppression, but that would have to wait until they found Ren a good tailor who wasn’t currently in Boston.

“Niiice,” Alec had purred, before turning Ren around to check the fit of his collar and the flare of the jacket’s single vent. “You are positively cute in this,” he told Ren with another broad wink Huxward. 

“Thanks,” Ren had told Alec with a shy smile that gave Hux palpitations, made his mouth dry up, and he reached into his pocket again for the key, gripped it hard enough for its teeth to bite into the scars in the palm of his hand. _No,_ he told himself, tried to find his way back to a comfortable detachment as Ren stepped back into the changing room to change back into his Zegna. 

Alec slipped Hux a name card with his personal phone number written on the back in large, looping numbers. “Call me,” he said simply as he bagged Ren’s new suit carefully, and Hux had taken the card and slipped it into his card case, behind Will Ellis’ credit cards. 

“You only want to date me to get a good look at the inside of my coat,” Hux teased, gently.

“Can’t blame a boy for trying,” Alec said.

\---

“I’m not sure how many more suits I can buy right now,” Ren said pensively from the passenger seat as they headed to their next destination.

“You are aware how much the Agency is paying you, yes?” Hux had murmured absently as they had pulled out into the traffic. The palm of his right hand had started to itch and sting from his sweat, and he grew aware that he had gripped the key hard enough to draw blood again. 

“I haven’t exactly been paid yet,” Ren said. 

“True,” Hux said, flexing his fingers experimentally on the steering wheel. “I’ll float you a loan.”

Ren turned his head hard to look at Hux with an expression of vague surprise. “You trust me that much?” 

“Kylo Ren,” Hux said, as they slowed to stop at an intersection, “I know where you sleep, and I know where you work, and I carry a straight razor all the time.” 

“Point,” Ren laughed, a little ruefully, and Hux surprised himself by chuckling along.

\---

They stopped at Nordstrom next, and this time Hux made sure that Ren preceded him into the menswear section.

“Let’s see how much you’ve learned,” Hux said as one of the store assistants came up to Ren.

“You’re not going to just abandon me to my own devices, are you?” Ren whispered a little nervously to Hux. 

“Hello, gentlemen,” their shop assistant said, a young woman with luminous eyes almost as dark as Ren’s. “Can I help you this evening?” She had pulled her thickly curled black hair into a knot at the nape of her neck, and her clean scalp shone brown from her asymmetrical part.

“I need a new suit,” Ren told her, cleared his throat as Hux signalled him silently, “maybe two.” 

“Well, my name is Claire,” she said, “and I’ll be glad to give you any assistance you need.” She paused, glanced at Hux, her eyes lingering on the buttons of his waistcoat and the cufflinks in his shirt cuffs. “Is there anything I can help you with, as well?” she asked him. 

Hux shook his head. “I’m just here to make sure my friend doesn’t buy anything he’ll regret.” 

Claire’s smile had widened just a little then, a knowing look in her eye. “Of course. This way, please,” she said, leading the way into the racks. 

“Are you sure I should be choosing my own suits this soon?” Ren hissed at Hux as Claire took his measurements, again. 

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll be able to notify you every time you make a stupid decision,” Hux said loftily. It was a little easier to step back from his feelings now, freeze them in place behind a wall of wit and archness. 

“Thank you so very much,” Ren breathed, sarcasm heavy in the last three short syllables. 

“Have you got a color preference? We could start narrowing down the options with that,” Claire had said after she had taken notes of Ren’s measurements. 

“Black,” Ren shrugged. Predictable. 

Hux had been provoked to look up at the ceiling and sigh. “For the love of God, Ren,” he said, “Color is not going to leap off the surface of the fabric and bite you in the arse.” 

Claire had fought a little giggle then, covering her mouth with a hand. “Black and gray suits to start? Nobody says you have to buy a gray one,” she suggested as a compromise, “but you can narrow down from there?” 

“Dark gray,” Ren insisted, and she had conceded the point gracefully. 

Claire knew her work well, and she had pinpointed Ren’s sense of taste quite well in the selection of suits she had picked for him to choose from. “This Z Zegna’s very much like the one you’re wearing now,” she had said, “but with side vents in the jacket,” she said, turning the two-button coat to display them. “Besides, it’s black, but there’s a vertical stripe element in the weave of the fabric. The texture can add interest without stepping out of your color comfort zone. It’s a good mid-weight wool for all seasons, and you can either turn the formality up with a shirt and tie, or wear a t-shirt with it for a less structured look.” 

Ren took the matching trousers up and checked the waistband, a detail that gratified Hux. “That’s a French fly?” he asked Claire, and she had nodded once. 

“Good catch. That’s practically mandatory in a suit of this quality. The pants are also partially lined,” she said, “and we can hem them for free, if you wish. The waist and sleeve alterations on your jacket are also free, and you’re probably going to want this one taken in at the waist, you’re so slim.” 

“Thank you,” Ren had said. His smile had been infectious, his face crinkling up around that sensual mouth, and Hux had reached into his pocket again for the key. Ren seemed to be responding better to Claire than he had with Alec, which gave Hux a painful little pang of hope: that Ren was straight and that this tiny infatuation was doomed in any practical sense. It would be so much easier if he could remind himself there was no chance.

Claire had picked out a few other suits, among them a hard-looking Hugo Boss that Hux felt was cut a little too broadly in the chest for Ren’s build, a nice Armani and a Versace in a luminous silk-wool blend two or three shades too light to qualify as “charcoal” in any event. But the one that had stood out to Hux’s tastes was a Burberry three-piece with a shawl collar on the coat, in a tight weave of dark gray and black threads. The intersecting light and dark in the wool plainweave fabric lent the suit animation and life as the gaze picked out the subtle crosshatch and resolved it into a good charcoal gray. 

Ren had noticed the texture of the wool, as well, and he had taken it from Claire’s hands and slipped a hand under the front of the coat, letting the light bounce off the bump of his hand underneath the superfine Merino wool fabric. “This,” he told Claire, “I want this one. It looks like a pencil drawing.” A wonderful and appropriate choice, Hux thought, for a man who looked so much like a pen-and-ink or charcoal drawing sprung to impossible life from hand-deckled rag paper. 

Ren had retreated into the changing room to try on his new selections, and Claire had returned the suits to their proper racks. “Has your friend made any stupid decisions, you think?”

“I’m surprised to say it, but no,” Hux said, his hands still in his pockets. He let the fingers of his right hand brush gently against the key but did not pick it up this time. 

“I think he’ll turn out okay,” Claire said with a gentle smile as the changing room door swung outwards. “That last choice was inspired. I wish my fiancé paid that much attention to how he dressed.”

This time Ren did not look remotely rumpled in the suit he had tried on. The matte dark gray of the jacket’s shawl collar set off the loose curls of his hair to wonderful effect, and while the waist could stand taking in, the Burberry fit him better off the rack than the D&G had. Hux was struck speechless for a few seconds as Claire turned Ren around to check the fit of his jacket across his shoulders. 

“What do you think?” Ren asked, looking at Hux’s reflection in the mirror he was facing.

A strange numbness had started to creep through Hux, as though he had bitten into a fruit he had been allergic to, or had just swallowed a heavy swig of turpentine-tasting vodka. It was a disconcerting feeling, but it had still hurt less than that strange wild yearning the Korrigan on Ren’s skin had awakened in him earlier.

“At least it isn’t another suit in black,” Hux managed to say slowly, after he found his tongue again (and the key in his pocket, and what would he have done without it tonight).

“But I like black,” Ren shrugged, and Claire had smiled again as Hux rolled his eyes in exasperation.

\--- 

They left Nordstrom with Ren’s two new suits, three new shirts (one gray, and two black, the last one with a leather collar that Hux had thought a little excessive), two silk neckties (both gray), two pocket squares (both white), and a new belt with a brushed silver buckle. Hux had also taken the opportunity to buy himself another pair of dress boots, having flown from Heathrow with only his current pair in the interests of suitcase space. He had mulled thoughtfully over most of the men’s shoe section before settling on a pair of wingtip boots in a burnished black leather.

Hux had paid for all the purchases, keeping the receipts neatly folded in his money clip, and they had exited to the parking lot to find their car. Hux realized that Ren was drifting loosely in his wake, oddly subdued with his hands full of bags, but they did not speak until they had both put their seatbelts on. 

“You haven’t said a thing since we stepped out of the store,” Hux said as he turned the key in the ignition, felt the motor shiver gently to life. 

“I’m just trying to figure out the kind of restaurant I take someone to after they’ve just lent me six thousand dollars,” Ren said slowly. 

“One would assume something slightly better than the average chain restaurant,” Hux shrugged absently, his focus shifted to driving as Ren pulled out his work phone from a jacket pocket and ran a search through it. 

“Give me a minute,” Ren had murmured, staring down at his phone, and Hux had driven along aimlessly, content to just rest in the moment. Lyrics drifted then into his mind, a scrap of song.

_and if a double-decker bus crashes into us_  
_to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die_  
_and if a ten ton truck kills the both of us_  
_to die by your side, well the pleasure, the privilege is mine._

_The Smiths,_ Hux thought morosely. He did not even like the Smiths, considered Morrissey self-indulgent at best and a pompous windbag most other times, but the sentiment of the song had tugged at him in this moment, where he was just content to exist at Kylo Ren’s side without thinking of the past or the future. In this brief time there was no love, no expectation, just a silent companionable being-ness that he wished could last forever, but also knew would not. 

“How much better than average are you looking for?” Ren asked suddenly from the passenger seat.

“I don’t expect you to take me to the Minibar at Cafe Atlantico, if that’s what you meant,” Hux drummed his fingers against the steering wheel impatiently, waited for the light to change at an intersection. 

“They’re so good, though,” Ren laughed, “No, I don’t think we can do last minute reservations - wait, I know.” 

Hux did not reply, simply glanced over at Ren in the passenger seat. How on earth could someone who ate fluorescent pink sugary cereal also like molecular gastronomy? Or more precisely, how could someone who had partaken of the $250 tasting course at the Minibar actually stomach something called Frankenberry? Kylo Ren was a mess of contradictions held together by black gaffer tape, gaffer tape because silver duct tape was in no way gothic enough for Ren’s personality. 

“How do you feel about tapas?” Ren asked, looking up from his phone. “There’s a good place on 14th Street Northwest.” 

Hux thought then of unctuous bites of _raxo,_ pork loin redolent with garlic, of stuffed mussels, plump and spicy, tiny silver anchovies lying white in a pool of vinegar dressing, the omnipresent olives - wait. 

“You don’t eat olives,” Hux said, his gustatory train of thought slowing to a screeching halt as he remembered how Ren had picked every single one of his olives out of his lunch salad Saturday afternoon. 

“I do,” Ren shrugged, “I just don’t trust them unless I’m sure they’ve been pitted properly. Long story. So. Do you like tapas?” he reiterated.

“Yes,” Hux said, at once amused and faintly irritated at his persistence. 

“Great.”

\---

Ren had smiled at the host at the restaurant until she had found them a nice, quiet table, just the two of them away from the tumult of the bar, and it had been a slight revelation for Hux to watch him flirt.

Ren had affected a very slight slouch, somehow scrunching his impressive height and breadth of chest into a less threatening show of slight awkwardness. From that vantage point he licked his lips, brought attention to that sensuous mouth and his gentle, crooked smile, veiled the force of his dark eyes with his long lashes. 

Hux watched him work, felt the thoughts click away softly within his head as he recognized the layers of behavior Ren worked with - first to neutralize the potential threat of his height and build, then to soften himself, present a hint of awkwardness and vulnerability. He thought back to the first time they had really met, not the time Hux had confronted him at gunpoint, but the time after when they had been having breakfast.

Ren had compared Hux to a painting, confident in his knowledge, almost arrogant in his assessment. 

It hit him then, a sick sense of relief - Ren could not have possibly been flirting with him. He was safe. He could try to be friends.

If only the realization had not ached so much, too. 

\---

“Tell me about your antipathy to olives,” Hux asked Ren, as the first of their platters arrived, silver-sided anchovies drowning in a gold-green lake of olive oil, a platter of creamy, tart goat cheese. 

Ren grinned over his orange-thyme gin and tonic. “It’s kind of a stupid story,” he said as he speared an anchovy on his fork, Poseidon and his trident in ridiculous miniature. 

“It must have been traumatic,” Hux said blandly, “to have affected to you to this day.” He held his glass of white sangria in his right hand, appreciated the cold beads of condensation on the itchy sting of his palm as he swirled the drink around idly. 

Ren shook his head. “You make it sound like a gang of olives broke into my home and shot my dad.”

“Well?” Hux sipped at his sangria as he waited for the waiter to place several more plates - jamón ibérico, steamed mussels in white wine, tiny wild-mushroom _croquetas_ and _pintxos_ , skewered jamón-wrapped figs, soft and ripe, stuffed with blue cheese. 

“Okay,” Ren smiled. “Since you want to hear the ignominious tale.”

Hux picked up one of the _croquetas_ with his fork, ate it entire, steaming heat and fragrance and crunch filling his senses as he waited for Ren to take a few bites and continue his story. 

“It was back in undergrad - I was twenty-one, my junior year,” Ren said pensively as he picked at a paper-thin slice of ham, folded it so he could pick it up with his fork. “I was having a hard Art History exam that day, Nineteenth-Century European Art, after lunch.” 

“I went down to the student cafeteria and got - I don’t even remember what it was any more, only that there were pitted olives in it, and it turns out one of them wasn’t.” Ren winced faintly at the memory. “I broke the second premolar on my upper right jaw -” he indicated with a finger just above his mouth, “clean in half, lengthwise. And then I had to go to an exam after that, because I didn’t have the time to wait for my number to come up at Student Health.” 

Hux felt a twinge of sympathetic pain, but it did not stop him from enjoying the skewered fig, its sweet cloying intensity offset by the rich saltiness of ham and its creamy cream cheese filling. Tiny seeds crunched between his teeth as Ren continued his story.

“So there I was, actually kind of bleeding and drooling onto a paper napkin, all slobbery and ungraceful while I tried to fill out my essay question, and of all questions I had to be asked about the Whistler-Ruskin trial in 1877.” Ren gestured animatedly with his left hand as he picked up another sliver of ham with his fork. “That trial is an important landmark in art history and criticism. It sets the precedent that art is whatever an artist says it is, critics be damned. Except, of course, I had a Rammstein concert going off in the right side of my head, and my ears were starting to ring, and I was trying not to cry in the examination room while all the facts dribbled clean out of my skull and onto that napkin I was holding under my chin.”

Hux blinked at Ren’s vivid turn of phrase, fought the urge to grin. “Your answer was less than satisfactory, I take it.” 

Ren nodded and sipped again at his gin and tonic. “Dr. Lamb liked me and knew I had extenuating circumstances, but it’s hard to justify giving an A to an essay answer that read like I had fallen asleep on my notes, drooled all over them, and then just rubbed my ink-smudged forehead onto the paper until some of it transferred over. I got a C. And worse still, Student Health was so booked up that they didn’t manage to schedule me an emergency dental appointment until the next day.” 

“And that’s why you hate olives.” Hux picked a mussel off its shell, popped it into his mouth, chewed slowly. He had almost forgotten how good they were in their briny iodine meatiness. 

“Again, I don’t hate olives,” Ren said with a hapless shrug, popped a _croqueta_ into his mouth, chewed and swallowed, “I just mistrust them. There’s a difference.”

“Isn’t that, I don’t know, rather phylumist of you to feel so?” Hux needled him gently. He picked up a tiny anchovy on the tines of his own fork, watched the light gleam off it, oily and silvergold, before he ate it. 

“Phylumist,” Ren laughed briefly at that. “I don’t know how you English people spend so much time convincing other people you don’t have a sense of humor, then say things like that.” 

“Oh, I have an ample sense of humor,” Hux said, enjoying the effect of his stiff upper lip just a little too much, “It’s not my fault if you’re not intelligent enough to get it.” 

“There it is again,” Ren shook his head and appropriated another morsel of ham, “How do you do it?”

Hux sipped at his sangria, enjoying the cinnamon bite and cider-apple notes mixed with the white wine. “Like anything else: practice.”

\---

They arrived at home some time past 9PM. Hux felt mellow, full of a good dinner as he parked his car at the curb and got out. Ren took a little longer to fumble with his seatbelt and climb out of the passenger seat, being on his third gin and tonic of the evening and trying to manage all his bags as well. Hux had to unlock the front door and enter the passcode for the house security system lest Ren misenter it in his intoxicated state and trigger the alarms again. Once had been enough.

The living room lights were on, but Hux knew from the lights on upstairs that Phasma had retreated to her own bedroom some time ago and had left the downstairs lights on for their convenience. He let the very encumbered Ren in, shut the door and turned the deadbolt. 

“Hux,” Ren said, leaning slightly against the entryway. 

“Yes?” Hux turned his back to Ren, turned towards the stairs leading up to their own rooms.

“This was a nice evening,” Ren said, slurring just a little on the edges of his consonants. “Thank you.”

Hux did not reply, and they climbed the stairs in silence, the only sound their footfalls against the steps. Hux opened the door to his own bedroom and stepped through while Ren hovered outside, setting his bags down on the landing and leaning against the banister. Tipsy, Ren looked incredibly fuckable, his eyes and mouth gleaming wetly from a flushed face, and the slightest smile still lingering as though he’d forgotten it was there.

Oh no. No no. He couldn’t. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t _fair,_ him standing there looking like that, not when Hux had just convinced himself there was no hope, not when he was too drunk to properly consent to anything, not when he was still Hux’s bloody housemate, coworker, the albatross around his neck - no. There was no possible way Ren could mean the way Hux felt the look in his eyes.

He swallowed, his throat tight.

“Goodnight, Ren,” he said, and shut the door. 

He leaned heavily against it for a long, desperate breath. 

“Hux?” Ren’s voice came thinly through the door, sounding confused, almost forlorn, and Hux did not reply, shut his eyes and ears and heart against the world and reached only for the key in his pocket. “... Bren?”

No. No, he couldn’t.

There was a soft sigh on the other side of the door, and a long silence, and Hux felt himself start to shake then, all that tension and restraint bleeding out of him in one slow sag towards the floor where he sat and listened for the sound of Ren’s door closing. It came, but minutes later, the wait longer than he could have expected. 

His left hand found the card case in his left trouser pocket, reminded him of the name card and phone number Alec had given him earlier that evening. One could relieve one addiction with another - wean a junkie off heroin with methadone instead.

He would call Alec tomorrow. Perhaps he would be free on Friday.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team flies to Luxembourg on an as-yet undisclosed mission, and Kylo Ren meditates on mercy, or rather, the lack of it that he is feeling. He also deals with his growing attraction to Hux in a manner very similar to how Hux is dealing dysfunctionally with his interest in Ren. What we have here is a failure to communicate. Also, bonus gun porn, because we, the authors, love you all.
> 
> \---
> 
> Content warning for suicidal ideations and thoughts on how to carry it out. These folks have guns and straight razors, so it's sometimes a professional risk with them.
> 
> Content warning for graphic violence and the consequences thereof.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is sex in this one. Unfortunately, Hux and Ren are having it with people other than each other because they are IDIOTS.

Kylo Ren had always liked flying - and he had been flying since his infancy. His parents had told him of how he never fussed or cried on flights, choosing only to be lulled to sleep by the roar of jet engines vibrating through the fuselage. He had visited several countries thanks to his mother’s work as a diplomat, and he had fond memories of each trip and destination - Helsinki, Tokyo, Seoul and Madrid, other, shorter visits to Berlin and Paris, Hong Kong, at his father’s side. 

Still, this trip was exciting - it was the first time he would be flying for work, the first time he would be in Luxembourg, and even the insufficient legroom in British Airways business class and news of a four-hour stopover in Heathrow had not dampened his enthusiasm. It had probably helped greatly that he had spent the previous seven-hour flight seated next to his team leader Nicole Phasma, and not his other co-worker, Dr. Bren Hux. 

Ren had busied himself with his sketchbook for parts of the 7-hour flight, drawing little thumbnail studies of the faces he had seen in Dulles Airport as he had waited to board, done a quick study of the stewardess who had brought him a glass of wine, and then lastly drawn several sketches of Phasma’s hands as she knitted something on several small double-pointed needles.

“It’s a sock,” Phasma had said absently as she had clicked away with a bright blue-green bight of yarn looped around her right index finger. “They’re the only thing I know how to knit.” Ren had watched, fascinated for a few minutes by the tiny rapid movements of her fingers and the needles. It had looked like magic to him, like some kind of slow-motion conjuration as her clever hands turned the yarn into more sock, stitches spiralling on top of each other in one long, infinite row.

Which was what she had told him when he had first started sketching as he sat by the boarding gate earlier in Dulles, when she had spotted him doing a study of a drowsy toddler curled up in her mother’s arms, face buried in a fold of her mother’s headscarf. Ren had never seen any magic in his ability to draw. It was just something he had been doing ever since he could remember. He wondered idly if this was how Phasma felt about her knitting abilities, as well. 

“It looks kind of like a Monet,” Ren had murmured as pools of green and blue had rippled up the side of her sock. The bright blue had reminded him of one of Monet’s 250 waterlily paintings, specifically the 1915 _Nymphéas_ on display in the Munich Neue Pinakothek. Ren remembered this one specifically because it was his favorite one of the series, and he had seen it first on a trip with his father at the age of ten. 

“Funny,” Phasma had said with a tired smile, “That’s what this skein of yarn was named when I bought it on Etsy.” She had put down her knitting then, and stuffed the unfinished sock back into a drawstring bag she had pulled out of her laptop bag and gotten up to go to the bathroom, and Ren had turned to look at the seat back in front of him. Visible in the narrow slice of space between the seat and the window was a profile Ren had grown quite familiar with in its elegance and coldness, full lips pursed slightly as their owner contemplated the clouds. 

Hux, Ren thought, looked down at his own open sketchbook, pencil held loosely in his hand as he scratched idly at the paper, tracing the line of brow and nose, the curve of his mouth, hardness of cheekbone and smooth jawline. The most frustrating, aggravating human that Ren had ever had the misfortune to know. Also, quite unfortunately, his co-worker and housemate for the past two months. And then Ren was sucking in a deep breath, turning the page before he finished the drawing because he could not stand to look at that smug face any longer. 

That asshole, Ren thought, before he started another drawing, lined the page with fierce-looking demons from all over the world, drawing the Hell that he had somehow landed in, a Hell that he wished he could stuff Hux in, just grab him by those perfect lapels and stick him there where he belonged among those flaring tongues and gnashing teeth.

Ren stopped drawing then, scribbled haltingly on the next page instead as weariness started to pull at him. He loved to draw, but always retreated back into poetry when tired or heartsick, or both. Sometimes the words came more easily.

_mercy is when you can rest your sick soul,_  
_body and mind in some slow sweet caress,_  
_to pause in your thoughts and to lie below_  
_boughs of green willow in summer’s address._

Ren sighed. Mercy. Why was that the word sticking in his head now, wanting to be turned into something? Mercy wasn’t a subject he felt he knew much about right now - not when so many hours of his waking and dreaming were given over to exercises in mercilessness. Ren had been working for the Agency for two months, and in that time he had earned his field qualifications. He had put in 120 hours of waking range time and even more asleep, hooked up to the PASIV as he trained in dreams. He had learned several ways to kill someone in hand-to-hand combat, none of them pleasant. He had learned what it had felt like to have his joints dislocated, bones broken, organs perforated with gunshot wounds, and he had also learned to fight through the pain and injury in those grisly dream exercises. 

And then Ren’s bosses decided that his first mission would be a covert job in Luxembourg with no guns and no violence, only guile and manipulation to lure in their mark with the world’s stickiest honey trap. It had disappointed him somewhat, after all that training, but it had also been a slight relief. Ren was not sure if he was ready, now or ever, to kill another human being in cold blood. Not especially when he knew, now, how it felt to be on the receiving end of such attempts.

He twirled his pencil in his long fingers, looked again at the page - it was no good, it was never going to be - and scratched the words out fiercely, obliterated them with dark sweeps of his pencil tip until nothing remained of them, only shiny graphite smudging on paper. He turned to the facing page in his sketchbook, turned it on its side to draw in a landscape format as Phasma sat down again, next to him. He did not look up at her, only continued working as she picked her knitting back up, and the click of the needles was soothing to listen to over the scratch of his pencil. 

He filled the page with gray, hatching in a broad grass verge in hundreds of tiny criss-crossing strokes, and used his eraser to lift out sections of darkness until they shone faintly, almost luminous against the half-lit darkness that he had rendered with sweeps from the side of his pencil tip. A little extra work picked out the stark boughs of cherry trees, naked in winter, and then all it took was more erasing to imply moonlight bouncing off the scene, off the branches and grass, off the pale gravestones he had blocked in earlier. 

There it was, he thought. Arlington National Cemetery, as closely as he could render it without reference. The dreamshare training had sharpened his visual memory, he thought, leaning yet closer to the surface of the paper as he picked out tiny details, hints of names, religious symbols engraved into marble. In the center of the composition stood his maternal grandfather’s tombstone - his mother Leia’s biological father, Anakin Skywalker, not her adoptive father Bail Organa. 

Anakin’s grave sat lonely upon the hallowed ground of Arlington, visited by few of his surviving relatives. He had served in the Korean War, and left the Army only to go straight back into the breach working for the Agency in the decades before the Vietnam War. He had, according to what declassified documents Ren had access to, been on the ground during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. His career had been exemplary until he had met Ren’s maternal grandmother, Russian defector Padmé Amidalevna, when he had smuggled her out of the Eastern Bloc and into the “free world”. He had continued his association with her clandestinely afterwards, and they had eventually married secretly following the birth of her twins in 1962.

That marriage had been Anakin’s downfall. Ren did not know the specific situation, but it had been long-standing family rumour that he had been coerced into leaking state secrets to the KGB in exchange for Padmé’s family’s continued safety. And then Padmé had died mysteriously in 1964, and Anakin had gone to his superiors and confessed his treason. He arranged for the adoption of his children shortly after that, and then went on one last mission from which he never returned alive. He had been buried in a cemetery in Iowa, where he had been born, up until the declassification of more material had vindicated his memory and rehabilitated his image. Ren’s uncle Luke had contacted his mother Leia after that, and together they had petitioned to have Anakin reinterred in Arlington. Ren had been present at his grandfather’s second funeral ceremony in 1995, when he had been 13, and the scene had stuck in his mind ever since. 

Anakin Skywalker had been one of the primary reasons why Ren had accepted the job offer from Langley - he had jumped at the chance to maybe, in some way, try living up to his grandfather’s reputation. The few stories he had managed to learn had felt incredible, unbelievable, and as a child Ren had always wondered if he would ever be half as cool as the family legends had painted Anakin. Now, as an adult, Ren would have been glad to be a tenth as capable as his storied grandfather, exaggerations or not.

\---

Tick tick tick. In a different time, a different place, a poured-concrete floor, a room with loud ventilation fans and target rails hanging from the ceiling. Ren had just finished reloading the SIG P226 he had been training with, had put on the appropriate eye and ear protection (shooting glasses, earplugs and over-the-head ear protectors). He leveled the sights of his SIG at the man-shaped target and had placed his finger in the trigger guard when he felt a sharp prod just behind his left knee, in the tender spot.

“Don’t lock your knees and elbows,” Hux said from behind him as he adjusted his stance. “Remember, you absorb the recoil with your entire body.” He was close, very close as he leaned in, body-heat against Ren’s back, breath against the skin of Ren’s neck as he sighted down the SIG over Ren’s right shoulder. 

Ren could smell Hux, smell his smoky cologne over the smells of gun oil and Break Free CLP, the old ghost of burned gunpowder, the faint wet-earth smell that somehow infiltrated this underground room even in this dream that Hux had spun up specifically for training purposes. Birch and pine and pimento, clean snow, and Ren’s palms had started to sweat as he fired his first shot, then a second, a third, quickly emptying the thirteen-round magazine. Half the shots missed the target as Ren’s hands shook slightly from the close contact.

Hux had sniffed, taken the SIG from Ren’s hands and reloaded it quickly, efficiently, then squeezed off three shots in a perfect Mozambique drill, double-tap to the chest, once to the head. He safed the SIG, looked it over, and then handed it back to Ren. “Again,” he said. “And pay attention.”

 _I could damn well pay attention if you’d just leave me alone,_ Ren thought but did not say as Hux stepped away. He fired the ten remaining shots in the SIG’s magazine, his aim improving as Hux had backed off. Most of his shots hit the center ring in the target’s center of mass, three straying to the right of it.

“Better,” Hux said as Ren put the SIG down, wiped his hands on his trousers and reloaded the gun. “Again. I want to see you improve your firing speed.”

 _Again_ was currently Ren’s least favorite word in Hux’s vocabulary, and he had heard it a lot in the past two weeks. Still, he reloaded the SIG, fired again and again until the target’s center ring was just one large, ragged-edged perforation. His hands stung slightly from the recoil, and his forearms ached a bit from repeatedly squeezing the trigger, and he thought resentfully of how hard Hux and Phasma and his bosses at Langley had been working him with all this training, kneading and shaping him into something he was not. 

Ren wondered why on earth they had hired an architect - someone like him - fresh out of graduate school when they could maybe have picked up someone who had been in ROTC or been part of the National Guard. The most violent things he had done prior to his taking the job at Langley had been kendo classes through high school and undergrad, a little target plinking at Uncle Chewie’s place in Maine with a .22 rifle when he had gone there on hunting trips. He hadn’t even shot anything on those trips, assisting mostly in skinning and cleaning game.

Soda bottles did not bleed, and shooting a person was going to be very different from field-dressing a stag already dead and hanging from a tree, and he wished the CIA had been satisfied with hiring an architect, and a terrific one, which he was, instead of trying to turn him into a mediocre field agent as well. 

Ren wished, as he reloaded his SIG again, that he had asked his mother’s lawyer to look through the paperwork when Langley had offered him the job - Phasma had mentioned the field qualifications being in the fine print, which he had missed. Teach him to not lawyer up, he thought glumly as he summoned the ragged target on its rails and replaced it with a fresh one. 

This time, he imagined Hux’s face staring back out at him from the target as he fired at it, and each shot had found its way unerringly into a tight group in the center ring, where his heart would have been. Maybe hateful thoughts were the way to better marksmanship, Ren thought as he flexed his hands and reloaded the SIG again. Hux was still watching him, silently, wordlessly as he trained, and he wondered who Hux imagined in front of his targets when he practiced. 

_Not me,_ Ren thought, _he doesn’t even care about me._

Ren had drawn a little doodle in his sketchbook after this dream-training session had ended, one with Hux tied to a tree and perforated with arrows a la Saint Sebastian, and himself as a tiny resentful Cupid. If only those notional dream bullets worked like Cupid’s arrows too, he had thought. 

Phasma had reassured him later that afternoon that his test scores were good and getting better fast, but Ren had been painfully aware that he could not, in fact, do what Phasma and Hux were capable of in the field. He had asked her then if it wouldn’t have been more efficient to train a field operative in architecture instead. 

“Ren, what we hired you for isn’t just the ability to design buildings and draw blueprints. We wanted someone creative who could work within the constraints of dreams designed to fool a subject into thinking they’re not actually dreaming,” Phasma had said. “That kind of creativity isn’t something we can train into someone. You have to be born with it.”

Ren did not know why, but he felt the strongest suspicion then that she had only told him that to be polite. 

He felt so inadequate. The training left him raw and wrung out, day after day. First he had real, physical training - time in the gym and on the training mat, range time - and then he had dream training, more of the same except there were fewer limits in dreams, and more moments of shocking agony as Hux used his medical expertise to demonstrate just how nasty hand-to-hand combat could be. 

And then there were the dream-sessions with Snoke as he had learned to push the limits of his own mind. Those, at least, had left him feeling omnipotent, like a god as he twisted geometry and architecture to suit his needs and whims. He had made gravity fold up the sides of buildings, twisted a street upon itself, and turned a flight of stairs into an Escher nightmare, ascending and descending all at once. 

But Ren had woken up feeling achy and queasy afterwards, shivering in his lawn chair as the timer on the PASIV had run out, an odd, nasty taste in his mouth. 

“Perhaps you are falling sick, Kylo?” Snoke had suggested as he helped Ren with his IV line. “You have been working fairly hard lately.” 

“Maybe I have a cold,” Ren had said, clearing his throat as he felt it itch. Maybe all this training was getting him run down. 

“I believe chicken soup is the best remedy in these cases,” Snoke said as he put the capped cannula in a sharps bin and discarded the used IV lines. 

Ren had spent the next two days shivery, feverish, sick in bed. He had wanted to go in to work the next day, but Phasma had put her foot down and made him stay at home. “You’re not going in if you’re unwell,” she told him, “I don’t want you infecting everyone else with the flu if that’s what you’ve got, and you can’t train if you’re sick anyway. I’ll make my grandma’s chicken soup when I get home.” 

Ren spent the rest of the day huddled in bed feeling as though he had lost one of those terrifying training bouts with Hux in real life - feeling as though someone had dislocated and reset every single one of his joints. He did not know why, but he started to cry into his pillow some time in that long, lonely afternoon, missing his parents terribly. 

He missed The Soup in particular, an incredibly restorative thing his father had first made when he had been thirteen and sick with chickenpox, almost ill enough to wind up in hospital. His father, Han, had simply rummaged around in the refrigerator for odds and ends, and made a broth from some beef bones, an onion and a brace of wilting carrots. From that broth he had made a soup with cabbage and diced tomatoes, frozen peas and some leftover rice from a Chinese takeout container and laced it with liberal amounts of garlic and ginger. He had propped Ren’s head up with an extra pillow and spoon-fed him the broth bit by bit until it had revived him enough to eat something solid. 

Ren had eventually recovered and learned the secret of The Soup, but at present he was also too ill to get out of bed and make some, and that had left him feeling wretched enough to weep again at his weakness and incompetence. Phasma had made her grandmother’s chicken soup, as promised, and she had brought a bowl up to Ren, but it had not been the same. It had been delicious, and was no doubt nutritious, but it wasn’t The Soup. 

Hux had come into his room after Phasma had departed with the empty soup bowl and sat down beside Ren to stick a thermometer in his mouth and take his pulse. He had listened to Ren’s breathing with a stethoscope, and then shrugged. “Your breathing is clear,” Hux said after a long moment mulling over Ren’s feverish chest. “It probably is just a flu.” And then he had pushed his chair back under Ren’s desk and left without another word. 

Something had gone seriously wrong between them since that Monday night two weeks ago, after the suit shopping expedition. And it was baffling to Ren, because he had been so sure that night that finally, he’d had the key to Hux.

They had shared plates, sipped at their drinks, talked about everything and nothing in particular, and Hux had seemed like a wholly different person then as Ren glimpsed a hint of the man under that reserve and hauteur. Hux had been intelligent, brilliant, incredibly magnanimous and kind, and there had been an incredible sensuality lurking beneath his stiffness. That attention to texture and color, to the way he smelled, had seemed quite erotic to Ren; it had tugged at the artist within him and the urge to bury himself in every detail and sensation so he could evoke his subject properly in any media he chose. 

The smell of Lubin Korrigan ghosted back up at him from his own pillow, spiked with the sweetness of strawberries, and he wondered how everything had gone off the rails. He wanted to split Hux in half figuratively, read the writing in his entrails, understand what he had done wrong. Hux had been so nice to him once. Had almost been his friend. Now he spoke to Ren only when absolutely necessary, from some kind of unfathomable distance, and Ren could only lie feverishly in bed and wonder if the tapas bar had just been a delirious dream. 

It had to be disappointment. Hux knew, now, as he hadn’t then, just what a mess they’d gotten themselves into hiring Ren for this job. And he couldn’t stand it. Ren knew how exacting he was, how much he hated to be held back by anything out of his control (because nothing in his control would ever dare to get in his way). Clearly, having to move at Ren’s training-wheels pace was driving him nuts.

Distant or not, Hux had always been absolutely truthful with him about his shortcomings, had never spared Ren’s feelings during their training sessions, and Ren knew that polished as Hux’s manners were, that he was not the kind of man to ever pull his punches for the sake of others’ feelings. This was just more of the same. He wouldn’t bother hiding what he thought of Ren. Maybe he thought it would make Ren train harder. But he already knew he couldn’t train hard enough for Hux to like him again. If it hadn’t happened by now, there was no hope. 

Ren had paid Hux back the moment his first paycheck had cleared. He had dressed as Hux had taught him to, worn the perfume religiously, trained himself bruised and battered, sore and aching in order to turn into the killer he was not, and that still wasn’t enough.

Phasma was different - she scared Ren, perhaps even a little more than Hux did, but she had been firm but kind when they had trained together. She had also introduced Ren to the limits of his strength and reach, but she had never frozen him out because of his lack of skill and experience. 

“Nobody’s born a Navy SEAL, Ren,” she had told him once after a sparring session that had ended with her effortlessly putting him in a triangle choke, her right leg wrapped around his neck as she used his upper arm to supply additional pressure. “Screwing up in training only means you need to practice, and that’s what we’re here to do.”

She had also told him a personal adage, that she trained as though she were really fighting, so that a fight would seem more like training. Despite that, she had never actually shot, stabbed or otherwise mangled Ren, not even in dream training, and he wondered sometimes if Hux actually took some kind of sick pleasure in that. Ren suspected that he would always fall short of Hux’s exacting standards, that Hux would always have critique or feedback about Ren’s sloppiness even if he did survive a fight with a Navy SEAL. 

And it wasn’t just at work that Ren didn’t measure up. Hux hadn’t even cared enough to come home for dinner on Fridays - hadn’t even given him the benefit of the doubt. He vanished somewhere with some boy toy for most of the weekend, every weekend, even after Ren had pulled out all the stops and cooked his best. Thinking about it even now left him gasping with frustration, and raging at the pain he felt as he had rolled over in bed, his joints groaning and aching as he did. 

He would probably have gone insane without Falcon. The restoration project had provided him an excuse to remain in the garage for much of his free time, safely away from Hux, who would never go near engine grease in those clothes. He had worn safety glasses and a dust mask as he unbolted and removed Falcon’s seats, kick panels and scuff plates. He tore the old, disintegrating carpet out mercilessly, gutted her interior before he took a shop vacuum to it. Removing the carpet had also allowed him to check the wiring that had run under the carpet and replace any that had started to wear out. 

He remembered when he had first spotted Falcon sitting on cinderblocks in someone’s yard, while he had been visiting his uncle Luke for Christmas. She had been half-covered by a ragged blue tarp, but he had recognized her almost instantly, even through the layer of frozen snow and rain that had encased her like a glass coffin. 

“Dad,” he said, nudging at his father to slow down, “turn around. I want a better look at that car in that yard there.”

His father had given him a hard look. “That P.O.S. over there?” 

“Yes, that car. I think it’s a ‘68 Chevelle.” Ren had insisted, and Han had turned grudgingly around. Closer inspection had proved that both their initial assessments had been correct; the car had been a ‘68 Chevelle, and it had also been out in this yard for so long that it was quite the piece of shit. Patches of rust had started to encroach on its its blistering paint, paint that had once been some kind of blue but was now a powdery-ish mildewy color. A pair of dogs had noticed them standing there looking at the car, and they had barked loudly, if not threateningly, as they slid out the door flap to stand on the house’s covered porch. The home’s owner had followed a few minutes later, a middle-aged man zippered up in a padded, insulated jacket. 

Ren’s father had gone off to chat with the man under cover of the porch, out of the wind and the rain while Ren tried to chip off some of the ice, to get a better look at the Chevelle. The interior was cracked where it was vinyl and was stained where it was not, and Ren suspected that they would probably have to overhaul the engine, if not replace it entirely, just to get it to some kind of drivable condition. 

Ren did not care, could not make himself care as he stood in the desultory freezing rain staring at this hunk of rust, imagined only what it would look after he had restored it. Red, he thought, a rich dark red enamel paint the color of a ripe Bing cherry, cream-white racing stripes. Black leather seats. He imagined the rumble and purr of her engine, the sheer torque at his disposal, imagined her off the cinderblocks and on drag wheels, aggressive, low, gorgeous. Somewhere in his mind, the car had become a her, a slumbering princess, someone who really only just needed love and hard work to awaken and live once more.

Ren had been so lost in reverie and fantasy that his father’s return had been something of a shock. “It’s yours,” Han said, and Ren had stopped short and looked at his father, blinked until the words had resolved in his mind to make some kind of sense. 

“You bought the Chevelle,” Ren said dumbly as Han opened the driver’s side door of their rental, got in. Ren scrambled into the passenger seat, out of the cold and wet, moisture already seeping through his hoodie to press cold against his arms. “God, Dad! How much did you pay?”

“Two hundred fifty. Don’t think it was worth all that much, really, but you looked like you wanted it. Merry Christmas.” The key turned in the ignition, and the heat kicked back on as Ren shivered in the passenger seat. 

“I -” Ren had started to sniffle, then, and then he stopped short as a couple very pertinent questions pushed their way past his emotions. “Wait. How are we going to get her back to Boston, and what will Mom say?”

His father had shrugged, his hands on the steering wheel. “I’ll get it towed to Luke’s garage, we’ll figure out what to do then. And if you don’t tell your mom that I bought this P.O.S., then it won’t be my fault.”

And that had been that. Ren’s dad and his uncle had helped him rebuild the car’s powertrain over their brief Christmas visit so that she could survive being towed back to Boston without shedding pieces of her transmission onto the asphalt on the highway back, and somewhere in that sweaty, sweary process he had stopped calling the car the Chevelle, and started calling her Falcon instead. 

Replacing the carpet in Falcon’s interior had filled three evenings, and replacing the upholstery would take more, but the project was soothing. It demanded his constant attention and concentration, and left him too busy to think about anything else, especially on those Fridays when Hux decided to vanish after work and only show back up on Saturday afternoon.

Right now, though, he was still too sick and achy to go down to the garage and work on his car, and his head started to throb every time he tried to read something, which meant that drawing or writing would be a lost cause. 

Ren was lonely, and this house was strange, and he would have felt better just having someone to sleep next to. He remembered his old bedroom in his parents’ brownstone house on Beacon Hill, the posters and artwork on the walls, his framed diplomas too. He thought of the time he had brought one of his ex-boyfriends back, and they had wedged themselves up against the wall in the too-small bed while trying not to make too much noise. He had woken up with his arm asleep the next morning, pins and needles jabbing furiously under his skin, but it had felt good to have someone else’s skin against him, their warmth pooling in the sheets as they breathed slowly, so slowly next to him. So utterly reassuring.

It had reminded him of times when he had been very small and frightened by nightmares. His parents had put him between them in their large old bed, and he had snuggled up to his mother and gone to sleep, sure that neither she nor his father would let the monsters get him.

Now, Ren thought, he lived with the monsters, went to work in a building full of them. He was training to be a monster too, even if he still felt like a child in a borrowed costume sewn from felt and flannel. But the monsters had moved into his heart and were ripping out pieces of him in a brutal overhaul - his squeamishness, his unfortunate case of scruples - to further facilitate his transformation into some creature of the night - a werewolf, maybe. Bit by bit Ren felt number and harder every day, recognizing the loss of his humanity only by some vague indefinable hurt he felt, the sensation like probing his mouth for a lost tooth. 

He wondered if this monstrousness was why Hux vanished every weekend - because he was too busy looking for someone fresh to devour. Had he started to snub Ren because there had been nothing left for him to feed on? Had the niceness just been a lure? Or, having caught him, so briefly, had Hux simply discovered there was nothing in Ren he really wanted?

Two could play that game, he thought as he stared furiously at the wall separating his room from Hux’s. He would find someone who wanted him, someone who thought he was good enough just as he was. And maybe just having someone to touch and hold close would ward off this cold loneliness, even for a little while.

\---

Hux had not ever thought he would be so desperately happy to see Heathrow again, but there he was, feeling oddly and vaguely more himself as he set foot on English soil. He did not like to admit it, but he was homesick, terribly so, more so now that he was back than he had been since leaving. The feeling was only made worse by the fact that he would only be spending four hours here, stuck in the airport, before he had to leave again for Luxembourg.

Hux had been struck with a most desperate, ridiculous craving for English food as he had exited out the airbridge leading into Terminal 5, which was something he thought cruel and bitterly funny in equal measures. To that end he had found a cafeteria once they had crossed over to the new Terminal 2, where they would wait for their departing flight to Luxembourg, and procured a cup of tea and a Melton Mowbray pork pie. 

“What is that?” Kylo Ren had asked him from across the table, as Phasma started to turn the heel on the sock she had been knitting. 

“The best meat pie in the universe,” Hux said simply, as he busied himself with his plastic cutlery and sliced his pie in half. 

“Wouldn’t that be the Quebecois _tourtière?”_ Ren asked, and Hux had paused to stare at him balefully. 

“I will cut you,” Hux said after he had chewed, swallowed and wiped at his mouth with a paper napkin. He was feeling better already after his first bite of pie. 

“With what, your stare?” Ren had asked impertinently. He knew Hux was not armed now, his straight razor locked away in his dressing case - they were not officially on any kind of governmental business, were just three people traveling together to Luxembourg right now. Guns would have been a liability in this mission in any case - they were not expected to run into any armed opposition unless things went very, very badly indeed.

Hux’s only reply was to pick up his plastic knife and run his thumb across the back of its dull blade. It would make a good sharp point if he snapped it right, and then he could stab Kylo Ren right in the carotid artery and save his snack if he was quick about turning Ren away so the arterial spray wouldn’t hit the tabletop. Then he could eat his pie in peace, and drink a proper cup of tea for the first time in two very long months. 

Phasma came to his rescue then as she swallowed a yawn and put her knitting down. “Don’t knock those, Ren,” she said, glancing at the wreckage of Hux’s meat pie. “Melton Mowbray pork pies are so good that they have EU protected designation of origin status. I kind of want one now.” 

“Thank you,” Hux said with a soft sigh. At least Phasma understood. Besides, Langley and Vauxhall would look dimly on his committing murder in public, especially that of a co-worker, no matter how maddeningly insolent Ren had been over the last two months. 

“Just don’t get the ones with Branston pickle in them,” he told her after a long, grateful sip of tea. Somehow the tea he made back in D.C had never tasted right. He wondered if the Thames River water had anything to do with it.

“Branston pickle?” Ren asked a little doubtfully, looking from Phasma to the fragments of pie crust on Hux’s plate, back again to her.

“The devil’s chutney,” Hux said as he speared another morsel of pie on the pathetic tines of his plastic fork. “Probably what happens when you feed a cow the pared-off bits of vegetables left over after the world’s worst mess of pottage and collect what comes out the other end, then season it so nobody can guess at its origins.” 

“Is this a bad time for me to say I also kind of like Branston pickle?” Phasma asked as she put the sock and its drawstring bag back in her laptop bag and pulled her wallet out of a trouser pocket. “Do you want a pie too, Ren?” 

“Sure,” Ren had shrugged, and Phasma had stood up and left to acquire herself a snack. Hux half-hoped that she would get one of the pies with Branston pickle in it, and then mix it up with Ren’s, but then that would probably lead to an endless stream of complaints about English food, and this was not a time when he would have suffered it gladly.

\---

Ren had seemed to understand the reason for Hux’s distance, or at least Hux had thought so for the first two weeks after their evening out. Ren had risen to all of Hux’s challenges, thrown himself wholeheartedly into training and dreamshare exercises, his hand-to-hand and firearms skills improving steadily as his dress sense had, and Hux had felt at once faintly proud and vaguely wicked for teaching him how to kill with efficiency.

It had helped Hux’s composure that he had managed to appease, if not completely drown his infant longing for Ren in another’s embrace. Alec had happily accepted his offer of a Friday night out, and he had turned out to be something of a wonder. He had undressed Hux slowly, almost reverently during their first date, his fingers slowly tracing the line of Hux’s lapels, the buttons of his waistcoat, appreciating each layer as he removed it. Hux had been content to lie back and be worshipped and unwrapped with such careful deliberation, feeling like a present given to someone who wanted to save the paper.

It was as though he had taken an acolyte, and the thought had made Hux grin as Alec continued to relieve him of his clothing with delicious, frustrating slowness. “I could almost believe you want to fuck my tailor,” Hux murmured as Alec kissed and nibbled his way down the button fly of his trousers, pressing his soft lips to wool and horn buttons, letting his hot breath caress Hux’s skin through his layers of wool and silk. 

“If that’s what it takes to become his apprentice,” Alec had shrugged, looking up into Hux’s face, all sly, wicked green eyes and lascivious smile, and then Hux had stopped thinking as Alec unbuttoned him, sprang him free, and then applied that clever mouth, and he had grabbed a fistful of Alec’s soft blond hair and forgotten entirely about Kylo Ren for the moment. 

Afterwards Hux had pinned Alec down like a sacrifice over an altar, no ram or thicket in sight, and slowly, methodically reduced him to a gasping, shouting mess. Hux had kissed the spunk off his lips, lingered over his neck, pressed his mouth to the heave and thud of his sternum, and Alec had writhed so prettily around Hux’s lube-slick fingers, moaned incoherently as Hux had sucked him off mercilessly. 

It still wasn’t what Hux had really wanted, even then. But it definitely had been something he had needed, and he had thanked Alec mentally as they lay wearily together, silent save for the sounds of their breathing. He had stayed for the night just to have someone warm next to him, to hold, and they had fucked again the next morning before Hux went home to shave, shower, and take a short nap. By that point they had already begun discussing what they might do, the next date, and though neither of them had intended for this to become anything serious, Hux had found himself unusually willing to countenance the planning.

Hux had thought that things could have continued this way, in that delicate balance of personal and professional, but Ren had decided to throw everything off beginning the third week of his stay in D.C. Hux had woken up at 1AM that Tuesday morning, stirred out of bed by a collection of thumps and a high and unlikely giggle drifting up the staircase. He had climbed out of bed and drawn his Browning Hi-Power, and then edged carefully to the bedroom door and stuck his head out for a look, his gun hand hidden safely behind the door. 

Hux did not take kindly to being woken by voices he did not recognize, in his house. Not especially if they were giggling. What he saw outside his bedroom was a drunk, likely drug-intoxicated Ren coming up the stairs with a new friend in tow, a slightly-built woman, ridiculously young and slightly drunk and leaning hard against his side.

Hux thought of many things to say. Most of them were variations on _“What are you, bloody stupid?”_ and _“You do realize this is a possible security breach,”_ but there had also been _“Why the bloody fuck are you doing this?”_ and a plaintive _“Please don’t do this to me,”_ somewhere in there. Hux had also recognized the possible hypocrisy of his last thought, considering his own personal life, but he had never been uncouth enough to bring anyone back and force Ren to listen to them in the night.

Instead he had stared at them a long, hard moment, and then managed to say, “Carry on,” in his coldest and most polite tone of voice. And then he had returned his sidearm to its holster and lain awake as Ren’s bedroom door slammed shut and the moaning began. Well, that had explained Ren missing their fortnightly roast chicken night, he thought bitterly as he rolled away from the wall that separated their bedrooms, as though those few centimeters’ difference would help at all. And then Ren’s date had said, “Mm, you smell so _good,_ ” the words attenuated through the thin drywall but still clear, and Hux had closed his eyes and reached behind him for the pillow on the other side of his bed, drew it over the top of his head, over his eyes as Ren laughed, deep and warm at that. 

The next hour had been an exquisite kind of torture relieved initially by proof, at least, that Ren fancied women and that Hux’s suit was doomed in the first place. And then she had gasped, loud and hard, and breathed, “You feel huge,” and Hux had bitten down on his lip hard enough to draw blood, to leave a tiny spatter on his pillowcase. He could resign his job tomorrow, he thought, give them two weeks’ notice, maybe he would have a chance with Ren then - and then he squelched those thoughts one after the other with merciless clarity. What was he going to do, if he quit? Go back to being a doctor in an underfunded NHS, live forever on the other side of his clearances, for a man who was very likely straight in the first place? 

No. Hux had gone too far, known too much, and killed too many people to turn back from his current course in life, and he sensed that things would not end well if he tried to quit now. Besides, he wouldn’t be there to keep an eye on Ren if he stopped working in intelligence - and Hux knew as surely as anything else that this job would devour Ren, chew him up and spit him out, if he weren’t there to take care of its nastier aspects. 

_Dear God,_ Hux thought bitterly into his pillow as he tried to ignore the noises coming through the wall between their bedrooms, _you are a right bastard fuckup._

That incident had left him raw, snappish and underslept, and his mood had only darkened through the day. The kid gloves had officially come off in a brutal sparring match taking place in a shared dream. Hux had previously contented himself to leaving notional bruises on Ren in most of their instructional fights, waking or otherwise, but now he fought harder, less mercifully. 

Ren seemed to sense the increased lethality of the fight, and had fought back with a similar intensity, swinging hard enough to bruise Hux’s cheekbone and bloody his nose. The pain had stung, bright and sharp, bringing tears to his eyes, and then he had met Ren’s next swing with a block, exploited his eagerness and overconfidence and dropped him to the mat with a throw. He had then extended his legs across Ren’s chest and squeezed his knees together, holding Ren’s wrist to his chest palm-up in a straight armbar. From there it had been an easy arch of his back, and Ren’s elbow had popped obscenely as Hux dislocated it. 

Ren’s scream had torn at Hux, and he had tasted blood then, the blood dripping from his nose into his mouth, coppery salt reminding him of last night as he released Ren and rolled off him. Then he had taken hold of Ren’s upper arm with his left hand and his lower arm with his right, felt the tension in the muscles as Ren screamed again. 

“Oh my God, what the _fuck,_ Hux?” Ren shouted, wild-eyed, the pain raw and audible in his voice. Sweat and tears pattered onto the mat beneath him as Hux pulled him into a sitting position. “Why would you do that to me?”

“Stop fighting me, you idiot,” Hux told him, “I dislocated your elbow. I’m going to reduce it now.” A swift, hard tug aligned Ren’s arm bones to a nearly-normal position, and a further brutal yank popped the joint back into place. Ren had shouted again as Hux worked, and he cradled his arm carefully to his chest when Hux let go and stood back up. “I did this,” Hux continued, “because your real opponents will have no reservations about doing this to you.”

“Fucking hell. You expect me to still want to spar with you after this?” Ren flexed his fingers slowly, experimentally, wincing. Normally this kind of dislocation would have been accompanied by tendon and ligament damage, massive bruising, possibly even bone fractures. Best medical practice was to splint Ren’s arm into place and support it with a sling, send him for further orthopedic follow-up. Fortunately, the Hippocratic Oath did not quite apply to dream training situations. Besides, dream injury was not real injury, unpleasant though it was. Kylo Ren would wake up as whole and healthy as he had been when they had gone under.

“Do you think someone who’s trying to kill you is going to stop trying because you’re injured?” That had silenced Ren, and he had stared up at Hux, his gaze still bright with tears, unreadable as that curved mouth quivered faintly, set into a cold, hard line. 

“No,” Ren had said, and then he stood slowly up, tested the range of motion in his elbow, shook his sweat-damp hair away from his wet face. 

Hux beckoned to him from across the mat. “Again.” Ren wiped at his eyes with his left hand, and faced Hux with a bitter, angry stare. _Good,_ he thought, feeling vaguely sick despite the thought. This was a lesson Kylo Ren would have to learn fast and hard, or he would be headed very swiftly for a sturdy wooden box six feet under ground level in the near future. 

Something had changed between them after that. Ren started to take his training sessions more seriously, and he developed a certain hardness in his gaze that was at once a slight relief and a great loss to Hux. He remembered Ren’s shy, excited smile the first time they had gone under together, how proud he had been to show off the impossible inside of his head. Ren was rarely that excited now, now that so much of his dreaming time was spent in training simulations. Hux felt as though he were vivisecting this excited, brilliant young artist only to resurrect him as a trained killer like himself. It hurt him to care this much about anybody, a new unfamiliar feeling of bone and muscle straining under a foreign force, quite akin to what Ren must have felt in that armlock. 

But it was that or watch Ren die when they went into the field together, and Hux could not bring himself to allow that despite the maddening frustration that existed now between them. He was responsible for Ren, even if he had to break him to make him what he needed to be to survive. But he _would_ survive. 

Alec had cancelled suddenly the next Friday afternoon, sending a text message that had read, _My sister’s babysitter cancelled on her, I have to go watch the munchkins tonight. Lunch Saturday? XOXOX_

He had never cancelled on Hux before, or even refused a date, and it came as something of a shock. Hux had rather been counting on the evening as a way to burn off some of the accumulated tension of the week with someone he was genuinely coming to like, someone he knew understood what he needed and what he could give, and instead he had been left with an empty Friday evening to fill. While he had dallied briefly with the idea of turnabout, of going to a bar and pulling and bringing someone back to the house so Ren would have to listen to his fucking this time, he also took operational security a lot more seriously than Kylo Ren did. 

He was too tired, he decided, to deal with the implications of bringing someone back that he didn’t know if he could trust. And equally, he was too tired to deal with the fallout of a bad date, or even a merely unsatisfactory one, or even contemplate the possibility, especially horrid tonight, that he might come back home alone after all. Far better to simply find another way to relax.

After work he went on a brief shopping trip to restock some of his toiletries, and stopped at a large bookstore on a whim. The Kindle was nice enough, but Hux missed the feel of paper pages rustling in his hands. He had then gone home with a faint sense of trepidation, expecting Ren to have cooked something terribly and terrifyingly American for dinner - but instead he had been greeted with the salt and umami fragrance of _dashi_ stock, the iodine hint of kelp and tiny dried anchovies. Ren stood in the kitchen with Hux’s navy blue apron tied around his waist, his expression intent, absorbed as he ladled up some broth from one of Phasma’s large soup pots, waited for it to cool and then tasted it carefully. 

“You’re back,” Phasma had said from her spot on the sofa. “Will you be joining us for dinner tonight? I’d recommend staying, personally. Ren made _oden_ tonight, and I haven’t had it in years.”

Hux had never had _oden_ before, wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but the smell of it was like a gentle caress, ghostly fingers stroking lightly at his limbic center, luring him on, and he realized suddenly that he was very hungry, had been since he had left work earlier at five. “Yes,” he said, feeling a great unaccountable sense of terror right then. “Yes. I will.”

Ren came out from the kitchen then, holding the soup pot in mittened hands. He deposited it onto a trivet on the dining table, and fragrant steam wafted up from it, curled in wisps around his face as he looked coolly, unreadably at Hux. “Dinner is served,” Ren said, and Hux got the vaguest feeling that he was being parodied, had no real answer to that. 

_Oden_ turned out to be a kind of hot pot, motley ingredients simmered in a soy-flavored _dashi_ stock, and Phasma had pointed the ingredients out to Hux as she ladled some out for herself. “Hard-boiled egg here, daikon radish slices, _ganmodoki,_ that’s fried tofu with vegetables in it, this is lotus root, _chikuwa_ \- that’s a fish cake thing, you know, surimi, and this is _kinchaku._ ” Phasma lifted a little bundle from her bowl with her chopsticks, something that looked like a tiny purse tied off at the top with a string. “That’s thin fried tofu stuffed with mochi. The tie at the top is dried gourd. Careful when you eat that, the mochi gets melty at this temperature.” 

Ren had served the stew with a dipping dish of something pale and yellow that Hux discovered was a sharp, biting mustard. He chose for himself what looked like the safest options for his first tastes - a boiled egg, some daikon and lotus root, and two of the little brown tofu cakes. The daikon had soaked up a good amount of the broth’s flavor, and the first bite had been hot, dense, rich and savory on his tongue. The lotus root had been subtly fibrous, starchy with a good hard bite, and the tofu was almost meaty and flavorful. 

“How do I eat this tidily?” Hux asked as he ladled himself a second portion, held up one of the tiny _kinchaku_ pouches in the ladle. It was too big to eat in one mouthful and he had recalled that mochi was a choking hazard. 

“You don’t,” Ren managed over his own bowl of _oden,_ a mangled tofu purse hanging from his chopsticks. “You just take a bite out of it, or you can use your chopsticks to pick pieces off it.”

Hux stabbed awkwardly at his _kinchaku_ until he had torn off a corner, found that the process was easier if he applied his spoon. Ren and Phasma were both so comfortable with chopsticks, handling them easily enough that it had left him feeling a little incompetent in their wake. The mochi was warm and soft, however, as Phasma had promised, and its starchy blandness was the perfect accompaniment to the salty richness of the broth in his bowl. 

Hux stared down at his bowl as he ate, tried not to watch the movements of Ren’s throat as he drank his broth right from the bowl, and wished so badly that he had Alec waiting for him. It was going to be difficult to keep his hands to himself tonight. Ren looked perfect in Hux’s apron, the dark navy blue offsetting the sweet-almond paleness of his skin. Hux had a sudden visual of Ren wearing only the apron, the pale skin of his flank gleaming against the denim, and he lost his grip on his chopsticks and dropped his hard-boiled egg back into the bowl, splashing himself with broth.

Hux retreated to the safety and privacy of his room immediately after dinner, and he put his new books in his shelf beside the Rimbaud - China Mieville’s _Embassytown,_ Richard Siken’s _Crush_ and José Saramago’s _Blindness._ He had bought the Siken on an impulse, based on something an ex had said to him, a snippet of poetry. _I couldn’t get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time._ Hux had taken his coat back when they broke up on a boozy, disastrous Christmas Day. Ewan had not been worth a five-thousand quid bespoke suit jacket no matter how good he had been in bed, and he had been one of the best. Hux had almost loved him too. 

Hux had gone to Paris for work shortly after the breakup, met a nice boy named Olivier, who had whispered lines of Rimbaud into his ear during their slow, leisurely fuck. Olivier seemed to sense that Hux had been freshly hurt and treated him with a strange, tender chivalry the whole night. It had been nothing serious, but the comfort that Olivier had given him was oddly touching, and he had bought the little volume of Rimbaud in a bookshop before he had left Paris, as a reminder of Ewan and Olivier, and how close he had come yet again to falling in love with someone. 

The strains of Ren’s bass came through the wall, hard and melodic, playing a line that Hux could not quite place in his memory. He thought of Ren sitting on the side of his bed, brow furrowed in concentration with those long slender fingers splayed across the fingerboard, and realized then that he was dangerously close to kicking Ren’s door down, plucking the bass out of his hands and pinning him down to his bed in a long, desperate kiss. And then he imagined the meeting with HR, the long flight of shame back to London, and he tried to think of a distraction, any distraction at all. 

Hux picked up the Siken instead, flipped through it to find the line Ewan had whispered to him once on a chilly autumn night after he had appropriated Hux’s jacket, opened the book instead to a random page. 

_You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trembling_ \- Hux shut the book sharply, harder than he had intended, closed his eyes and dropped it on the bed, his heart in his throat. 

Damn it. Damn it all.

He thought briefly of the straight razor sitting in his trouser pocket, of its reassuring sharpness, of the strop around his left wrist. He could take the strop off and wrap it around his knuckles, hone that blade to a whisper sharpness and open his arteries into a warm bath. It would barely hurt. 

He sucked in a long, slow breath, and took the Mieville with him, locked himself in the bathroom with the book and his new toiletries. He left his sidearm on his nightstand, with his key, and the razor on his valet stand. 

They could wait for him, he thought. They would always be there. He could bear this for just a little longer. This was not the first time he had thought to do this, and it certainly would not be the last. 

The hot water soothed Hux somewhat, as he reclined in the bathtub with the Mieville hardback in his hands. The smell of sandalwood and almonds, vanilla, lemon, labdanum floated up from the water as the solid bath oil he had bought dissolved in its warmth, and the smell helped his fraying nerves as well. He still could not summon the concentration to read, however, not in his current state of mind, and eventually he put the book down on the closed toilet seat and leaned back into the hot water, felt the tension in his back and shoulders start to attenuate as the oils did their work. 

Ren’s bass stopped, abrupt in its silence, and then he started at the beginning of the passage again, practicing until he got it right, and Hux felt that the world might be almost, just almost perfect except for the wall separating Ren’s bedroom from the bathroom, that immeasurable gulf standing between the two of them. 

Hux could feel his skin softening in the emollient bath, thought then about how this would be perfect for a date night, to have someone touch and caress him in the silkiness of this fragrant water. He tried to think of Alec’s smallish, nimble hands running up his chest, closing around his hips, but the visuals did not stick - besides, Alec’s apartment was equipped only with a shower stall, not a bathtub. 

Hux’s thoughts kept running to Ren instead, one thin wall away from him, and he knew that he was going to have to get some of this sexual frustration out of his system before he went and sabotaged this careful distance, cultivated in so much loneliness and pain. He thought of Ren again, of how his throat moved when he swallowed, imagined that mouth wrapped around his cock as he reached down and started to touch himself in long, low strokes, let out a long breath of tension and frustrated desire. It was so hard not to think of Ren, and Hux just gave up entirely as he ran his hand slowly up and down the shaft of his cock, gave himself wholly over to the slick fantasies that had been building in his head. 

Hux imagined Ren bent double beneath him, that narrow face flushed as Hux fucked him, bent over a desk, on his knees with spunk dripping off his pointed chin. Hux thought of the gleam of Ren’s hair, of how silky it would feel gripped in his fist as he fucked that aggravating mouth into silence. The blood heat of the bathwater felt so good, the bath oil slick against his right hand and the shaft of his cock, and it was easy, oh so easy to bring himself off imagining how Ren would look with pearlescent drops of seed dripping off that unruly hair, those long eyelashes. He came then with a long, sudden gasp of relief, the sound fading into his heavy breathing as he relaxed again against the heated porcelain of the bath tub. The tension bled out of him completely, as he lay back with his eyes closed, dimly aware that Ren had stopped playing his bass at some point. 

_So what?_ a part of Hux’s mind went, _so he might have heard you having a wank. That’s still more discreet than what he’s been doing._ He was too tired, too worn-down, and now too spent to care in the slightest about what Kylo Ren thought of him, now or ever.

\---

Hux thought through most of the weekend that perhaps he had found a brittle equilibrium - that he could probably manage his life, emotions and all. But then he had also spent most of his weekend in Alec’s bed, and on his couch in between. Alec had shown him a selfie with his adorable little nieces over their Saturday lunch at his apartment (homemade spaghetti carbonara), all three of them sticking their tongues out at the camera.

“That’s as good a reason to miss a date as any other,” Hux had shrugged, smiling a little wistfully at the photograph, at how happy Alec looked next to the two little girls. It must have been nice to have a functioning family. 

Alec took his phone back after a few moments, grinned. “I thought about calling you after I put Jessie and Alice to bed, but there were Cheerios on the floor and Land Before Time was still in the DVD player, and I really couldn’t imagine you there.”

“No,” Hux said, pensively. “Neither can I.” He had never really given much thought to family, or having one, since his mother’s death when he had been twenty-two. His father had died eight years before that, and he had been content enough to live mostly alone for the next nine years until he had come to D.C. and found himself sharing a house with Phasma and Ren. And frankly, that experience had rather sold him on the benefits of living alone.

Alec looked away for a moment, and then he turned his face back to Hux. “So. What’s it like being James Bond?” he asked, changing the subject gracefully. 

“I’m not James Bond,” Hux said, secretly glad of Alec’s sensitivity and consideration. He was such a nice boy, almost too sweet for such a cold and cynical world. 

Alec had laughed at that. “You’re English as fuck but you drive a car with U.S federal government plates, you won’t tell me exactly where you work, and you go armed all the time. I can put two and two together, you know,” he said, his smile wicked and knowing and just a little too pat. 

Hux sighed, knowing that his answer would let a little of the mystique out of the matter. “It’s boring. You spend a lot of time in an office going over data on your laptop. And you won’t believe the paperwork you have to fill in if you discharge your sidearm outside of a firing range.”

“Aw.” Alec looked back down at his empty plate. “That kind of ruins it.” 

“It does, quite.” Hux reached across to run his fingertips over Alec’s knuckles, stroked the back of his hand idly, and they had left the dishes and silverware on the dinette table and adjourned to the bedroom. 

“Has anyone told you how beautiful you are, Will?” Alec asked him, lying back on his bed with the afternoon light slanting across him, a bright stripe of gold across his face, burnishing his hair bright. His green eyes gleamed like uncut emeralds in the light, and Hux had paused to just look at him in his _déshabillé,_ shirt undone and untucked, trousers tugged down his hips to expose skinny hipbones, delicate filigree of golden hair trailing low down his belly to halo his fine cock. 

“No,” he said after a few moments of thought and appreciation. “Not often.”

“You’ve been fucking the wrong people then,” Alec laughed gently. He took careful hold of Hux’s necktie, drew him closer to stare him in the eye. “Because you’re absolutely gorgeous.” 

Hux had laughed a little then, amused and gratified to hear that coming from a boy who looked like Donatello’s David recast in gold. “If I’m gorgeous,” he whispered into Alec’s ear, “then you’re a bloody angel come to life.” 

“I wouldn’t want to be an angel,” Alec had laughed after that, “they’re supposed to be sexless.” 

Hux thought of several answers to that assertion, including one about how angels were supposed to have mated with humans in the Bible’s antediluvian past, but he chose instead to help Alec out of his pants with slow ceremony, unbuttoned his own shirt and let his braces slide off his shoulders before he undid the buttons on his fly. Alec reclined louche and debauched against his pillow, his delicate complexion coloring pink as Hux taunted him with a slow striptease, and he did not resist as Hux took his wrists and tied them to the headboard with his necktie. 

“I am going to fuck you,” Hux told him softly, “and I’m not going to be happy if you start struggling and stretch out that necktie.” 

“Point,” Alec had smirked, drawn his knees up and parted his legs to give Hux better access. “That thing probably costs more than I make in a day.” 

“Maybe,” Hux shrugged, bent his head to the hollow of Alec’s belly, planted a light kiss there. “Whatever will we do if you damage it?” he asked as he unrolled a condom down his cock, squeezed lubricant onto his fingers, and Alec had shivered with delight at his touch. 

“I’m sure I can work something out,” Alec managed between gasps as Hux eased himself in, arched up against him. The buttons on his open shirt were cold against Hux’s chest, and he felt Alec wrap his long skinny legs against his waist, pulling him further into the slick embrace of his asshole. 

“I’m sure we will,” Hux managed to whisper into his ear as he took a long, steadying breath, shifted his weight to rock easily against Alec’s tight ass. Alec had moaned prettily then, and Hux thought, _bless this boy,_ and then decided not to think any more, decided to just lose himself in touch and taste and smell, sought refuge in Alec’s perfect velvet heat. Hux fucked him fast and hard, mercilessly, grasping at the sharp planes of his hips as he thrust upward, ever upward into this sweet, temporary oblivion. 

Somewhere in the back of his head Hux knew that he was being unfair to Alec, that he was just using him as a substitute for Ren, that he hadn’t even told the boy his real name, but then Alec had hooked a foot around an ankle and pushed himself back and up against Hux, and he was coming, blessed white fire obliterating every last doubt in his brain. 

Hux untied Alec after he had finished, kissed him on the forehead, the bridge of his nose, that hot willing mouth, and then worked his way downwards as Alec’s fingers had closed around his hair and tugged painfully hard. It didn’t take long for Hux to bring Alec off at all - he simply closed his eyes and let the boy fuck his mouth, eager and frantic until he came in a bitter, briny gout of spunk. Hux had only swallowed then, again and again, suckling at him gently until Alec’s cock started to soften in his mouth, and then he had fallen into bed beside him and shut his eyes for a brief rest. 

That afternoon with Alec had hurt and helped at the same time. It had grounded Hux, soothed him, helped him deal better with everything, but it had also left him feeling cheap and cynical for offloading his problems onto this sweet, wonderful person whom he had been treating as a substitute all along.

Hux had tried, at least, to give Alec as good a time as he had enjoyed, and they had both gone into this with no real expectations for a permanent kind of relationship, but it still left him feeling vaguely hollow. He could see how eager Alec was to keep him, how much the boy actually enjoyed his company when they were not fucking, and the knowledge had gouged at his lacerated feelings anew. What a heel he was being.

He had sought refuge in work and reading instead, and Phasma had raised an eyebrow at him Monday afternoon when he had turned his timesheet in ahead of deadline. 

“Is something wrong?” she had asked him. They had been alone in their shared office at the time, as Ren had another one of his dreamshare sessions with Snoke, and Hux had been sorely tempted to just tell her everything, spill his guts messily onto the floor. And then he thought of what she would think of him then, and did not. 

“I don’t know,” he told her. “Perhaps I’m coming down with that flu Ren had two weeks ago.”

“Ugh.” Phasma made a face. “At least we’ve got a leftover chicken carcass in the freezer. Tell me if you’re not feeling better by the end of the day, okay?” 

“I will,” he told her, resolving to do nothing of the sort. Instead he sat at his desk and tried to think of what to make for dinner tonight, failed, and then went down to the shooting range. He picked up his shooting glasses, ear protectors and a box of ammunition at his locker on the way to the range. 

The range was not very full, and Hux found himself practicing his Mozambique drill repeatedly, emptying his ten-round magazine again and again as he did. Hux still liked to do his range time physically despite his access to dreamshare training - there was something soothing about its repetition, the way he could practice until the process of aiming and firing was so ingrained into his muscle memory that he did not have to think while under fire. 

Hux had done dry-fire exercises yesterday with an inert training round, working on the smoothness of his draw and target acquisition for fifteen minutes. His preference for carrying his Hi-Power in a shoulder holster meant that he had to draw from the left side of his body, and then bring the sights up from that position to aim and fire. Those disadvantages were offset, he felt, by the fact that drawing was easier from a seated position when wearing a shoulder holster and that his sidearm was still easily accessible in winter wear. 

Then he had drawn and aimed his Hi-Power with his eyes closed, and then opened his eyes to see if the sights had lined up where he had wanted them to be. He repeated this drill standing and sitting until he had become absolutely familiar with the movements required to draw his sidearm, aim and fire in one motion. He tried to do this drill at least once a week - any less and the lack of practice started to show. Any delay in aiming and firing out in the field could potentially cost him his life. 

Now he practiced double-tapping each target in the center ring, shooting it twice in its notional heart, and then paused to aim at its head and fire once more. It was perhaps more efficient from some points of view to just double-tap a target in the head, but people usually moved when they were being shot at, and Hux had learned from experience that acquiring aim on the head of a moving target sometimes cost more time than he realistically had. That situation was exactly what the Mozambique, or failure-to-stop drill was created for. 

One shot a theoretical attacker twice in the chest - or center-of-mass, as was euphemistically said - and then aimed for the head and fired if two sucking chest wounds did not drop them quickly enough. Two center-mass shots had generally sufficed for everyone Hux had shot in his career to date, but there were many things that could cause an opponent to shrug off two .40 rounds to the chest. Body armor was one, drugs were another, sheer stamina was a third. Besides, people weren’t killed by opponents they had stopped - they usually died at the hands of an opponent who had not dropped, and that was why the Mozambique drill was such an important thing to practice. 

And then there was also the Tueller drill. It was a generally accepted rule in self-defense shooting that an armed opponent starting closer than a distance of six and a half meters was capable of running up and stabbing an average shooter before they could finish drawing, aiming and firing. Hux had, through constant practice, shaved the distance down to six meters. Any less and a training partner could touch him before he drew and aimed a replica training gun, but those situations were also why he trained in hand-to-hand combat and carried a straight razor in his right trouser pocket. 

In the field one’s life could hinge on these tiny fractional differences - 40 cm, half a second, sometimes less, and that was one of the reasons why Hux kept his hair short. The slightest distraction could cost far more than he was willing to pay, and he did not know how Kylo Ren coped with that unruly mane of hair, worn at such an inconvenient length. It wasn’t as though long hair was automatically incompatible with the responsibilities of the profession - Hux had known a co-worker in London with the most glorious head of long ash-blond hair, and he had worn it in a neat double-tied ponytail that he kept tucked down the back of his coat in the field. Tied up like that his hair had been almost long enough to sit on, and it had shone like beaten gold in the sun. 

Hux had also spent a good amount of time eyeing the man (and vice versa) as they had passed each other down hallways at Vauxhall, but nothing more had come of it for professionalism’s sake. Which was yet another thing that Hux did not understand about Kylo Ren. Ren was lucky, Hux thought, that he was such a brilliantly talented architect, because Hux also felt that he would have fired Ren two weeks ago if the matter had been left up to him. 

The range time did what Hux had hoped it would do. His hands tingled slightly from the recoil, and he reeked of spent gunpowder even through a fresh spray of cologne, but the exercise had helped him find a state of mindfulness. Hux had once tried Zen meditation and given up entirely, as the process of emptying his mind had only opened it up for a host of anxious, annoying thoughts, but practice, exercise and training seemed to do for him what meditation did for others. It had smoothed out his thoughts and calmed him somewhat, and in the process he also honed his skills, keeping them as sharp as the razor in his pocket. 

Hux figured out dinner on the way back to his office, and he had written down a short grocery list when he sat back down at his desk - he would go to the grocers’ for lamb chops, tomatoes and cucumbers, and to a good delicatessen for olives and feta cheese, perhaps some excessive Greek pastry for dessert. There were still sweet yellow onions in the net bag in the pantry, he remembered, and he could get a good bottle of table wine, a red, from the grocers’ where he got most of the ingredients. A few other items - muesli for breakfast, some plain yoghurt, more tea - rounded off the list.

Kylo Ren came into the office then, back from his training session with Snoke, and Hux pretended not to look at him as he sat sullenly down at his desk. 

“You smell like an ammunition dump that went off,” Ren said, apropos of nothing.

“Well, you smell like a hospital hallway,” Hux said reflexively, annoyed that Ren had not yet learned to accept that smelling like burnt gunpowder was a common consequence of range time. Besides, it was true. Ren always smelled vaguely medicinal when he came back from training sessions with Snoke, a fact that Hux had found slightly odd for no particular reason at all. People smelled like the places they had been in, and Snoke always left his dreamshare laboratory clean, well-disinfected. The place always smelled of iodine and floor cleaner, and Hux wondered if he were only trying to find something to nitpick about Ren, again. 

Phasma cleared her throat from her desk, her expression still mild as she continued to stare at her monitor. “I just got a copy of your range qualifications in my inbox, Ren,” she said, “Good work. Now we just have to work on your hand-to-hand a bit more, and I think you’ll be good for fieldwork.”

“This means I get a gun, right?” Ren picked lint off the sleeve of his Dolce and Gabbana, laced his long fingers together in his lap. The studded leather belt he wore today glinted under the sterile fluorescent light, and he stretched his booted feet out as he leaned back in his office chair.

“Yes, you’ll probably get your issue sidearm in a week, hopefully less,” Phasma said, “Considered how you’ll be carrying, yet?” 

Ren shrugged briefly. “The tailor you recommended left an inch and a half of slack in my waistband so I could carry behind my hip. I thought I’d consider that.” 

“That’s what I’m using, it’s a good concealment option,” Phasma said. “If you get one of those I recommend one with a good forward cant so it prints less against your clothing, preferably a tuckable inside waistband holster so you can pull your shirttail over it and have it hidden even when you’re not wearing your jacket.” 

Ren nodded. “Where did you get yours?” he asked.

“Mine’s custom-made,” Phasma said, stood up and took her jacket off, turned around to let Ren study it. “My smaller waist meant that anything holstered in a holster designed for a man would start to dig into my flesh after a bit. I’d come home, take my holster off, and find a bruise on my back from the hammer.” The horn grips of her stainless-finish 1911 shone softly golden against her dark blue blouse, above the broken-in leather of the holster clipped to her belt. “Eventually I got sick of the bruising and had this one made for me.”

Ren swallowed. “Ow. Even gunleather is sexist.” 

“Everything is sexist, Ren,” Phasma rolled her eyes ceilingward. “You just happen to have the option of ignoring it all the time.”

Hux shot a glance at Ren, who chose not to ignore it this time, who looked slightly sheepish, actually. He shrugged, sympathetic and yet not - _Think before you say something idiotic next time, Ren_ \- but Ren turned away then and busy himself with his work laptop.

\---

Hux returned home with his groceries only to find that Ren had come home only long enough to change out of work clothes and drive off in his Chevelle. 

“Is he coming back for dinner?” Hux asked Phasma after she had given him the news. She was sitting on the couch, knitting something red and tubular while she channel-surfed. 

“He didn’t say.” Phasma shook her head, stopped knitting for a brief moment. “I’d say save him a plate in case he does?” 

Hux sighed and went upstairs to his room, took off his suit jacket, and then came back downstairs to start preparing dinner. He was determined not to let anything ruin his evening, not especially when he had lamb chops planned. 

Downstairs in the kitchen Hux rubbed the chops with olive oil, sea salt and chopped fresh rosemary. He heated a pan, sprayed it with cooking spray and waited until a drop of water sizzled on his surface - then he put the chops down one by one, making sure not to crowd them. He chopped the tomatoes and cucumbers while he kept an eye on the time, turned the chops with a pair of tongs at the three-minute mark, and then continued preparing the salad for another three minutes. 

At the six-minute mark he took the chops up and plated them individually, topped them with a sprig of rosemary and a spiral of lemon peel each, and let them rest. That done, he continued with the salad, cutting the feta cheese into cubes, slicing the onions finely, and tossing it all together with salt, oregano and olive oil. The olives he put in a separate bowl in case Ren would indeed grace them with his presence tonight. He then covered Ren’s plate with another to prevent its contents from chilling too fast, and brought the other two out to the dining table, followed by the salad bowl and the still-corked bottle of wine. 

“Ooh, yummy,” Phasma said as she glanced at the Bordeaux Hux had selected, and then she passed him and headed into the kitchen to collect glasses and silverware. And then she squealed as she found the last of his dinner purchases in a plastic clamshell box on the kitchen counter. “Baklava!” she cried, “you bought baklava, you wonderful man. It’s my favorite.”

“They had a baklava cheesecake at the delicatessen, but I thought that might have been a bit much,” Hux said as Phasma returned and placed two wineglasses, one at each plate, laid the silverware and napkins down neatly as well. 

Phasma stopped, her second set of silverware still hovering over its place at her side of the table. “I need to know where you found it,” she said. “For theoretical reasons.” The tone of Phasma’s voice implied that her intentions towards baklava cheesecake were not strictly theoretical, but Hux chose not to judge her. He had sparred with her (and lost more times than he liked to admit) and watched her bench press more than a hundred kilos, and she could eat what she wished with the amount of training she did daily.

Dinner passed pleasantly enough, with Phasma making appreciative noises at her rare lamb chop and her glass of wine, but Hux could feel his mood deteriorating every time he looked at the bowl of olives beside the large salad bowl. Ren’s plate sat, still covered on the kitchen counter, and Hux had stabbed angrily at his salad, barely tasted it as he imagined Ren’s lamb chop cooling and drying out. It had taken him another effort of will to channel his thoughts towards pleasant conversation, and he had almost succeeded in forgetting Ren’s snub by the time they had started on dessert. Hux and Phasma had finished their slices of baklava, and were both staring wistfully at the third, uneaten slice and the crumbs on their own plates when the front door opened to reveal Kylo Ren. 

Ren was flushed, not quite drunk, his dark eyes impossibly bright, and Hux had the sneaking suspicion that he was high on _something._ And then all his thoughts on Ren’s imaginary positive toxicology screens had faded as he saw Ren’s guest step out from behind him into the foyer. 

Ren had brought a boy back for the first time in Hux’s experience, the first time in the month they had lived together here in D.C. 

The realisation was stunning, but reflexively, Hux wanted to brush it off. _So he’s bisexual. He went to art school. That is hardly unusual._ But then he had looked hard at Ren’s friend, noted the delicacy of his coloration, lavender shadows on pale skin, cool blue eyes. Skinny jeans, spattered with paint. Skinny arms under a black t-shirt for some band Hux was probably too old to have heard of. Messy, shaggy, bright copper hair.

 _Bloody. Fucking. Hell._ Hux felt the blood drain from his face, realized that he was gripping his fork tightly enough in his right hand that his knuckles had gone white. He was also suddenly very conscious of the small brass key in his trouser pocket where it sat unobtrusively next to his straight razor. He wanted to reach for one or the other, flinched away from reflex.

“We left dinner for you, Ren,” Phasma said, as she glanced from Hux to Ren, and then back again. Hux knew that he was awake, terribly awake right now even without his totem, because this was the kind of ache and cruelty that only his waking hours would visit upon him.

“It’s fine,” Ren said. “I’m not hungry.” He turned away then, and went upstairs, his feet treading heavily on the steps, and his date had hesitated, glanced at Hux with a long look of pity and smugness intermingled, and Hux had taken the third piece of baklava and impaled it upon his fork, ate it in hard, crunching bites without tasting it at all. 

Phasma did not say anything else. Instead she cleared the plates from the table, brought them to the kitchen sink, and then went to collect her knitting from the couch. _Fuck,_ Hux thought again, closed his eyes as he realized that was exactly what Kylo Ren was going to be doing in fairly short order.

Hux felt sick, dizzy and reeling, as he took his empty dessert plate to the kitchen, stacked it and the rest of the dishes in the sink in the dishwasher. _Too much sugar,_ he told himself. He should not have eaten that second slice of baklava, no matter how satisfying it had been to deny Ren any pleasure in it. It was probably more reasonable to have shared it, or given it to Phasma instead, considering that she had alluded to her ability to eat baklava cheesecake, a dessert that frankly, frightened Hux a little whenever he tried to think of its nutritional content. 

But he had eaten it, and barring the use of his first two fingers it would stay eaten, and he sensed that making himself throw up would only make him feel sicker. Besides, he spent a lot of time worrying about his figure already, and he did not want to open the door into bulimia or any kind of orthorexic eating disorder. 

It was becoming very hard to stay standing. His ears were ringing. He thought of going up to bed, knew what he would have to listen to if he did that, and felt even more nauseated at the thought. Instead he shut the dishwasher door and shuffled into the living room, past Phasma, who was now knitting at the dining table, and lay down on the couch. 

“You look like hell,” Phasma said as she watched him recline with his forearm over his eyes and one of the throw pillows under his head. “You’re almost gray.” 

“Just a headache. I think you’re right. I have that bug Ren had,” Hux managed weakly. The couch was not as comfortable as his bed would have been, not quite long enough for someone of his height, but it was surprisingly clean for something that looked like it had survived two or three previous owners, and the nausea seemed easier to deal with now that he was lying down.

“Stay there,” she said, “I’ll put those leftovers away and get you some ibuprofen.”

“Thank you,” Hux said, and then he heard her footsteps receding into the kitchen, the sound of utensils scraping against the salad bowl. The fridge door had opened and shut, and then the tap ran briefly. Phasma’s footsteps became louder, closer again, and then thumped softly up the stairs, and he heard the floorboards creaking faintly as she walked down the hallway to her room. 

And then she had come back down the stairs, and he had taken his arm off his face, opened his eyes slowly to find her with a pair of pills in one hand and a water glass in the other, a folded blanket tucked over her right arm. 

“Just take these and get some rest,” Phasma said, “I’ll be knitting this sock for a bit, yet.” 

“So that’s what you’re knitting,” he said weakly after he took the pills with a long swallow of water, and let her tuck the blanket around him. 

“Yeah,” she had smiled, then taken the glass from his hand. “They’re the only thing I know how to knit. Don’t go into work if you’re still feeling sick tomorrow. I don’t want you to be Patient Zero of some organizational flu epidemic.” 

Hux had shut his eyes then, still feeling sick and disoriented, and the faint clicking of Phasma’s needles soothed him oddly, more than he thought they would, as he fell into a heavy, uneasy slumber.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo Ren becomes a qualified field agent, and the team are issued their first mission. Luxembourg is not everything that Ren had dreamed of. Unfortunately, Rory Gallagher is.
> 
> \---
> 
> Content warning for graphic violence.  
> Content warning for suicidal ideations and self-hatred.  
> Content warning for unwise use of alcohol to deal with depression. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is now going to be a Chapter 5 because they spent so much time being depressed here that we didn't manage to fit the smut in. We are halfway through 5, though, and it's spectacularly porny, so hang in there, dear fans!
> 
> PS: Phasma's nickname for Ren is "The Heedless Horseman".

Luxembourg, august and ancient, formed originally as a Roman fortress, then passing to the Franks, the Carolingian Empire, a host of duchies up until its independence in 1890. A small nation, wealthy, cultured, homogeneous. And, Kylo Ren thought sullenly, a place that he would mostly see and know from the insides of hotels and restaurants and bars up until this job was done. As it was the team would spend two days cosseted in their hotel rooms until Hux had completed his metamorphosis.

He had asked Phasma what he was supposed to do, and she had blandly suggested he relax, get some sleep, enjoy the room service and fifty channels of cable TV in languages she knew he spoke some of. But it wasn’t that easy.

Ren sighed to himself as he glanced out a gap in his hotel room drapes, at the city that he longed to wander and lose himself in, to soak in the architecture, the old quarter, the museums. Out there, there would be something worth doing.

In here, he rolled over and over on the incredibly comfortable bed without sleeping, channel surfed, stared at the menu until it lost all meaning, and watched the numbers on the bedside clock plod towards night.

Ren didn’t believe in an interventionist God, but at this point he felt as though Hux were punishing him for the weeks of disturbed sleep that had occurred whenever Ren had brought someone home to fuck. _Fuck him,_ Ren thought, intending it in all of its flexible meanings as he began to pace the room in his boredom again, _fuck him and his unbearable arrogance. And fuck Rory too._

\---

Ren had earned his hand-to-hand qualifications, the last outstanding part of his field agent training, two and a half weeks ago. Phasma had unexpectedly declared that he would be training with her that day, instead of his usual session with Hux.

What she had unleashed upon him had been a brutal, vicious sparring match, pushing him to the limits of his knowledge and skill. She had refrained from killing or maiming him, but had sternly refused to pull any punches, and the fight had still terrified Ren, especially when she had pulled out what had looked like a very real knife in the middle of the bout. 

_Christ_ and _Jesus_ and _Fuck_ , Ren thought then as the light caught the blade, but he did not waste his breath protesting. Instead he had stepped back to give himself more room, gauged the length of the blade in proportion to Phasma’s arm. He did not have a great reach advantage when fighting Phasma, in any case - they were both equally tall and lean - and the knife granted her precious inches. She could hurt him badly with it if she intended to, and Ren had learned very personally at Hux’s hands that he could not expect any of his opponents to grant him mercy at all.

Ren used his legginess to his advantage, stepping backwards as Phasma advanced, ever mindful of the space behind him. And then he waited for her to put her right foot forward, compromising her ability to thrust the blade forward. She started to reverse her grip, winding up and then Ren caught her rising hand with his left, chopped his right hand downwards against the joint of her thumb. His strike hit a nerve cluster, and her fingers loosened momentarily, just enough for Ren to take the knife from her left-handed and hold it up to her throat as his right hand closed around her right wrist. 

They stood still like that for a few seconds, like statues, and then Ren dimly realized that he was trembling, and that the knife in his hand was a highly realistic rubber training knife. 

“Good work,” Phasma said as she pulled her hand away from his grip, rubbed at her thumb gently. “Very good work, Ren.” 

Ren let his left hand drop. “I think I might need to change my underwear,” he breathed, before he handed the rubber knife back to her. 

“You might, but you’re also still alive to need it,” Phasma said. She smiled briefly. “Hux is right. I think you’re ready for fieldwork.” He watched her flip the knife expertly, changing grips smoothly, all muscle memory.

“Hux? What the hell has he been telling you?” Couldn’t be anything good, Ren thought as he caught his breath, and sighed internally. “I’m guessing I’m a complete disappointment in the sparring ring?” 

Phasma shook her head, glanced at him under her long eyelashes. “He told me that you almost choked him out, yesterday, and that he thought you were ready for testing.”

Ren let out an audible sigh then, as he felt the trembling in his hands ease. “Was that what this was? A test?” 

“Kind of,” Phasma shrugged. “I wanted to see how you’d react to the unexpected, because real combat is nothing but a set of plans for things that don’t happen.”

“Do you two use the same phrasebook?” Ren asked, suddenly intensely curious. “Hux told me once that a plan is a list of things that don’t happen.”

“Not the same phrasebook, no.” Phasma grabbed a towel and threw it to Ren, who caught it. “I’ve spent too long in America to sound like Posh Spice, there, even if I wanted to,” she said as she reached for her own towel. 

Ren stopped wiping at his face, stared briefly, astonished. “Sorry - you didn’t just - is that what you call him?”

Phasma grinned, broad and mischievous over the edge of her own towel. “Only when he isn’t around to hear it,” she said before she dried the sweat from her hair. 

Ren wondered about her nickname for him, and decided not to ask, ignorance being bliss. With his luck it was probably Emo Boy or something equally unflattering.

\---

Ren took a quick shower in the locker room and reapplied his Lubin Korrigan before he put on his suit again. With the suit came his holstered SIG P226, Parkerized steel heavy in the holster clipped to his belt, and he patted it gently as he fastened the buckle, felt the holster snug against the the back of his hip. He had been a little apprehensive about going armed at first, but he had slowly gotten used to it over the course of a week. Now its weight evoked mostly a heightened awareness of his surroundings, a reflexive mental run-through of draw-fire exercises and sighting.

He was now a reasonably accurate shot by most standards, but Hux was still working him hard in dream training, pushing him through repeats of dry-fire exercises in dreams and waking, and endless rounds of the Tueller drill in dreamshare. Those had been unpleasant, as Ren had learned just what Hux could do with that straight razor he carried in his pocket. At least the razor had been honed so sharp that the cuts didn’t really hurt, not until he felt the wet warmth of his own blood dripping down his skin and pattering in little percussive drops on the floor. 

Ren had chosen to save up his frustrations and retaliate in their hand-to-hand sparring sessions, which had borne unexpected fruit yesterday.

Hux had thrown Ren late in their afternoon session, when they were both tired, worn-out, starting to make mistakes, and this time Ren had retained enough awareness to punish him for it. He had used his reach advantage to grab at Hux’s shoulder, pull him down to the mat too, before snaking his right arm around Hux’s neck and tucking his head underneath his arm. From there it had been easy to clasp his hands together and extend his thumb to improve pressure on Hux’s trachea in a guillotine choke, and he squeezed his knees together around Hux’s arms and chest to improve his leverage and prevent him from resisting. It was just how he had been taught to do it, and for a wonder, it was working - he could feel that Hux was trying to fight him, but Ren had the upper hand and he wasn’t going to give it up.

It had come to him then, a bitter thought as Hux pressed his shoulder harder into Ren’s chest, struggling for escape: they were only close now when they were trying to kill each other. 

Hux’s pulse had beat hard and fast against Ren’s hand and wrist, and he did not tap out, would not, as though testing Ren’s willingness to kill. Fine. If that was what he wanted, that was what he would fucking get. Ren let his emotions fuel his strength, feed his aching muscles, push him past being someone who wanted to hold Hux in any way other than this.

 _I will fucking murder you if this is what it takes,_ Ren had thought, awash in self-hatred and disbelief that this was even happening, _if this is the only way you’ll let me touch you._

He maintained the choke until he felt Hux weakening against him, his weight sagging as his air ran out and his consciousness began to ebb. Ren had let him up then, shoved him away and left him gasping on the mat as he rolled up and to his feet, stalking towards the bench where they’d left their towels. Sweat was burning in his eyes, pouring down his face and matting his hair to his cheeks. _Good,_ Ren thought as he buried his face in his towel, _he can’t tell I’m crying like this._

The sharp report of Hux’s gun made him startle, but he didn’t look up. He knew what he’d see if he did. And although that had gotten easier to forget, he was already crying; he would just wait for the dream to collapse, let the floor crumble out from under him, and not look at the motionless form on the mat. He knew what he’d done.

Ren had woken as the dream had fallen in on itself, only to find Hux’s chair empty. 

“He left,” Ren said as he loosed the tether from his left forearm, let Snoke withdraw the cannula from his arm, held the gauze swab over the tiny bleeding pinprick. It was a good thing the cannula was this fine, he thought, or he’d look like a junkie and people would start getting the wrong ideas. 

“With some haste,” Snoke said. He popped a cap over the cannula, snapped the capped cannula end off and dropped it into a sharps bin, started to work on the line that Hux had left on his lawn chair. There was blood smudged onto the coupling on the line, its tether, the imprint of a thumb and forefinger. Snoke had not been exaggerating. He had probably not even bothered to let Snoke tend to his IV line. And then Snoke proffered Ren a sterile swab in its little foil envelope, and a roll of medical tape. “If you find the good Doctor in your office,” he said with a little nod, and Ren had pocketed the items, put his suit jacket back on, and left the lab. 

_Physician, heal thyself,_ the adage went. _If only he could treat me, too,_ Ren thought sourly as he waited for the elevator. _If only._

But there was no help there either. The office was empty; Hux was already gone.

\---

Hux had known for some time that the day would come when Ren would finally get the better of him. That, after all, had been the entire point of the torturous process he had been putting them both through - if Ren could not best Hux, he still had more to learn from him, and while he still had more to learn, he wasn’t ready for the test yet. There were better hand-to-hand fighters in the world than Hux. But he fancied that there were probably none who cared quite so much about Kylo Ren and his continued survival, no matter how much he might try to deny that he did, and that lent an element of dedication to his teaching that perhaps no-one could better.

So it had not been a surprise for Hux when Ren had managed to put him in a chokehold - their sparring sessions had been building ever slower towards this conclusion, and he knew the mistake he had made as soon as Ren pulled him down. What had been a surprise was the heave and stutter of Ren’s ribs against his cheek; he was crying.

Heartache bloomed, exquisite and crimson, as Ren tightened his grip and pushed harder into his trachea, and he felt its thorns unfurl cruelly into his chest and neck as he realized how far he had pushed Ren, that things had come to this. It wasn’t the first time Ren had cried in a session - he cried easily, perhaps too easily, and Hux had brought him to tears often enough. The first time he had dislocated Ren’s elbow, the time he had cracked his knee, dislocated his shoulder, broken several ribs, all in dreams. But this was different. He had not managed, today, to do any sort of stupendous physical damage that would explain it.

He fought the choke, at first, but Ren was determined and strong, stronger than any art student should ever have had to become, and Hux knew then that Ren wouldn’t let go.

His vision had started to gray out as he leaned into Ren’s violent embrace - taking what comfort he could in the contact, recoiling from it mentally. He had no right to Ren’s cruelty or his affection alike - not when he was the entire reason the young, excited artist had disappeared underneath the mask of a professional killer. 

He would not tap out. Ren had earned this and Hux wouldn’t take it from him - he could kill him if he liked. He couldn’t even bring himself to mind. He would simply wake up, whole, on the other side. It was perhaps the only punishment for his terrible, terrible crimes that would make sense. 

But Ren had let go then, pushed him off and stood up, leaving Hux gasping, curled on his side on the mat. Behind him he could hear Ren’s breathing through the roar of his pulse in his ears, the shuddery intake of air that signaled that Ren was still trying very hard not to cry out loud. 

And then he felt the fierce stinging in his own nose and eyes, the tightness in his abused throat as he caught his breath, and he dreamed his Hi-Power into his right hand, and shot himself before Ren could see him break. 

The physical pain dropped away as his eyes opened, but the emotion had remained, sick, heavy in his chest, and he had flinched physically at its intensity. Any second Ren would wake, and find him like this, and - he pulled himself free of the IV and its tether, his movements sharp and panicky, heedless of the blood welling at the small puncture. He would not wait for it to stop. He would not wait for anything.

He grabbed his jacket from the hanger on the wall and ran, ran from his grief and shame and the look barely glimpsed on Snoke’s face, a look of too much understanding.

He sprinted up the stairs two at a time, choosing not to wait for the elevator, pushing down the sleeve of his shirt over the still-oozing blood and letting it soak into the fabric. He would worry about that later. 

Phasma was at her desk, and asked him some sort of question he didn’t really hear and didn’t really answer as he scooped up his laptop and shoved it into his bag. He couldn’t talk, not now, perhaps not ever but especially not with the feeling of Ren’s hands still about his throat.

On his way out to the parking lot he noted that the bloodstain on the crook of his elbow had smudged into a heart, the red darkening slowly to brown, and he had wanted to laugh at that, but felt the tears too close instead. He drove home, left his laptop bag in his locked bedroom, and then walked slowly away from the house, in the direction of downtown Bethesda. 

Phasma had sent him a brief text message, not long after he’d left the office. _Are you all right?_ it had read, and he had answered it while he waited to cross a busy street. 

_I will be tomorrow. I’ll make up the hours over the next two days._

And then he had turned off his work phone and shoved it into his jacket pocket, ignored it in favor of the brass key in his pocket. He gripped it tightly in his fist like a talisman, felt its teeth bite into his flesh again and ignored the sting as he walked briskly to the first bar that he found and liked. 

The place had just opened at 4PM, and Hux had picked a seat at the bar furthest into the establishment, a corner well away from where diners and other drinkers would generally sit. He leaned heavily on the bar, and then the bartender had come up to him, her expression already slightly sympathetic. 

“Hi,” she had said, her blue-dyed hair purplish in the ruddy light from a lava lamp in a niche in the wall. “What can I get you?” 

“Something strong. What have you got?” he asked her. 

“Tonight’s our Whiskey Wednesday night, so we’ve got five-dollar Jameson, Jack Daniels, and Pig Nose Scotch.”

Hux thought of the sweet phenolic notes of Jameson, how it had registered almost like a Christmas pudding to the nose, and nodded in approval. “The Jameson, please,” he said, “a double.” 

The last time he had partaken of Irish whiskey was nearly two years ago, the last time he had gone to visit his mother’s grave in Lifford. He had stopped for drinks with several of his distaff cousins and the whiskey had comforted him then; with luck, it would now. 

The bartender brought him his drink, and he threw it back in one hard swallow, tears pricking in his nose and the corners of his eyes. “Tough day at work?” she asked.

“Yes. Another, please,” Hux had said, and then said nothing more. She poured him a second double, and then glanced over to him as she continued to work, pouring and mixing cocktails for a three-top of early diners. He caught that glance, knew that he would have to pace himself or she would be obligated to cut him off and send him home - and where would he be, then? Lying miserable and alone in his own room, dodging Phasma’s questions and avoiding Ren? So he sipped his second drink and stared instead into the many lava lamps against the walls, watched their eternal swirl and burble as he slowly, methodically drank himself into a vague state of numbness. 

A few people had tried to sit near him and talk to him, but the bartender had intercepted them, distracted them with her clever conversation as she seated them beside more garrulous drinkers, and he had been very grateful for her perceptiveness and professionalism. She had not tried to talk to him more at all, only bringing him a fresh drink every time he asked for it. 

Hux stared at the lava lamps and the televisions over the bar - they helped him to not think, and somehow he managed to while seven hours away over five doubles, before the blue-haired woman spoke to him again. 

“Hey, James Bond,” she said softly, gently, “I’ll be off-shift in an hour, and I’m going to have to cut you off then, okay?” 

He had nodded then, unable to trust his own voice at that point. He gripped his empty shotglass tightly in his numb fingertips and probed internally for the grief and pain and fear he had felt earlier in the day, found it just distant enough through all the blood in his alcohol stream. 

“Do you want me to call a cab for you?” the bartender continued as she started to wipe the bar down. 

“No. No, I live nearby,” he managed to say, pleased that he was not slurring too badly. “I can walk.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, her pierced eyebrow raised, and he had nodded, then regretted it a little as the room started to spin light and watery around him. He had paid then, left her a tip larger than his tab, signed the receipt with an illegible version of Will Ellis’ signature.

“Take care out there, okay?” she had said, and he had sensed that she meant it as he slid off his barstool and tested his equilibrium. Not what it might have been, but sufficient to shuffle his slow, sorry way home. 

The cool air outside stung a bit on his overheated skin, and his ears rang from all that drinking and the loud live music in the bar. _Alcohol is a vasodilator,_ he remembered, and he had laughed sadly, bitterly to himself as he walked back down the street to the crossing. 

_Physician, heal thyself._ What would serve to shrink this cancerous love in his heart, purge the poison from his veins? Surgery could do nothing for something so insubstantial and strong as desire, and benzodiazepines would only mask the pain until the dosages started to interfere with dreamshare, or he fucked up and overdosed and the interaction between somnacin and the tranquilizers killed him. Morphine did nothing against emotional pain, and anti-inflammatories would do nothing to cool his feverish mind. 

He was overfull, with thoughts, with feelings, with too much whiskey, too much blood in his veins, too much hurt for one man’s skin to contain. He thought again of his straight razor as he crossed the road, pondered its reassuring presence - perhaps the answer was bloodletting, as his ancient predecessors would have recommended? Open up his arms and let everything inside him pour out, red and metallic, let it be a mess for someone else to clean up.

He staggered, suddenly very sick, went to his knees and voided the contents of his stomach into the gutter. 

The retching started tears he could not stop, and they left cool tracks down his face as he stumbled the last meters back to the home he shared with Phasma and Ren, his vomit sharp and sour in the back of his throat. Somehow he managed to get in the house without tripping the security system, and he dragged himself slowly up the stairs, leaning heavily against the wall as he did so. He had not intended to slam his bedroom door, but he had fallen face-first into bed as the door had shut behind him, safe at last. 

For a long while after, he had continued to weep very quietly into his pillow, the way he had as a child, with his second pillow pressed carefully over his head so that nobody would be able to hear him. 

He might as well have pissed on the Mona Lisa and set it on fire afterwards. He had destroyed something of equal, of infinite value. _I taught him to kill,_ he thought, thinking of Ren, thinking of their many sparring sessions, _I thought him into killing. I’m a beast. Just a great horrid beast._

He did not remember falling asleep.

\---

Ren had gone out, too, unable to stomach the prospect of a night at home, alone. He had brought back a date, and had his fun, and now it was sometime past midnight and Hux still hadn’t come home. Ren had lain awake next to his date, until he heard the front door open, and shut again, and the thump of Hux’s footsteps coming up the stairs.

Those footsteps had sounded unsteady, slow and dragging. Was he drunk?

Then Hux’s door slammed shut and silence returned to the night.

Ren was falling slowly asleep, almost, when he heard something like a sob coming thinly through the wall that separated their rooms. He frowned drowsily over the top of his sleeping date’s head, wondered if that had only been a fragment of dream or a figment of his imagination, and then he had shrugged and closed his eyes and returned to sleep.

In the morning, on his way to the shower, he crossed paths with Hux, fully dressed a good hour ahead of schedule and carrying his laptop bag. He was silent, grim, clearly weary, grayish in the thin morning light, and he skipped breakfast to go straight to work, but then wasn’t at his desk when Ren and Phasma arrived. He seemed to be doing his best to avoid them, which had put Ren in a sour mood until Phasma had announced their sparring session.

The fight had left him strangely energised once the adrenaline spike had worn off, and he was ready now for Snoke to put him through his paces. He had succeeded at one thing today, which was a lot better than his usual average. Why not make it two?

It was a surprise to finally find Hux, in the gloomy underground lab, already asleep in one of the lawn chairs. He was stretched out in his usual spot, with his jacket on the hanger he always left in the lab for it, but he was not hooked up to the PASIV at all. Instead a regular IV line was taped carefully to his wrist, the cannula inserted into a vein on the back of his hand. The bag of fluid was about half full; he’d been there a while. Maybe all morning, while Ren was defending his own life against six foot three of scary blonde lady.

“D5W, five-percent dextrose in water and thiamine. A slight departure from the standard protocol for alcohol intoxication,” Snoke had murmured as Ren had raised a quizzical eyebrow. “It is never the hair of the dog that cures you.”

“Was he really that drunk?” Ren asked. 

He did look pretty awful. Hux was pale, paler than usual, even, purplish shadows marring the skin under his eyes, and his chest rose and fell slowly. Goosebumps stood out on the skin of his forearms. Ren had never seen him drunk, before - still hadn’t, really. But from the steps on the stairs the night before, and to be in this state now, he must have been.

“I cannot say,” Snoke said with a pale twinkle in his good eye, “but he is certainly very hung over. I forbade him from sharing dreams today. Every participant would have experienced his headache.”

“Ouch,” Ren breathed as he considered the effect of having to share someone’s hangover, imagined what it would be like if multiple parties were hung over at the same time. “So what am I going to do today, then?” he asked Snoke, almost as an afterthought.

“Dr. Hux suggested that I tell you to go down to the range to practice your Mozambique drill,” Snoke said. “Or we could work more on your dream architecture. ”

Ren thought for a moment. He wanted to dream, but… Hux had gotten here first, and something didn’t feel quite right about just lying down next to him like there was nothing wrong. Besides, he’d probably pull another vanishing act if he woke up and Ren was there. 

He watched Hux breathe for a minute. It was like watching a kid sleep, he thought to himself. It didn’t matter how much of a little shit they were when they were awake; it was hard to mind so much when they were so peaceful. 

Then he stopped short as he saw Hux shiver briefly in his sleep. 

“This lab is kind of cold,” he said, trying to sound disinterested. 

“There are blankets in that cabinet over there,” Snoke said, pointing to one of the cabinets over the room’s clean-up sink. He turned back to the workbench then, to tinker with a spare PASIV unit that he had stripped down to its bare casing and motherboard unit, and Ren crossed the room to retrieve one of the blankets. The first one he pulled out was dark blue, and he shook it out and draped it carefully over Hux, wondering why he was doing this for the most irritating person he’d ever met. Maybe because he was asleep. He’d never know.

And then Hux stirred, and Ren froze - fuck, he’d woken him, and now he was going to have to _explain_ this - but Hux only murmured something almost inaudible then, and turned his head to the side, as Ren tucked the blanket around his shoulders. 

“It’s okay, mum,” Hux had murmured, “it’s okay.” 

Something small tightened in Ren’s chest. It was ridiculous, and yet… he didn’t feel like laughing. What on earth could Hux be dreaming of, that made him reassure his mother while lost in sleep?

None of the answers he arrived at felt like pleasant ones, and he finally retreated out of the laboratory to get his ammunition from his locker, and go down to the shooting range to practice as Hux had suggested. 

Ren had thought of his parents as he fired shot after shot at the target, thought of his mother’s gentle sternness, his father’s indulgent warmth. He had taken his parents for granted, he thought, assumed that their love would be there forever and always. Wasn’t that the case? A parent’s love for a child was supposed to be unconditional, ideally. They were supposed to take care of you and keep you from harm. And yet Hux had been trying to reassure his mother, not the other way around. _Is that why he’s so remote?_ Ren wondered. _What went so wrong in his life?_

Ren called his parents’ home in Boston that night after work, for the first time since he had moved down to D.C., the first time in a little over a month. Five weeks, to be exact. His mother had picked up the phone. 

“Hey. Hey, Mom,” he had said, “I just wanted to chat.”

“Oh, Ben.” He could see Leia’s smile already, just from the tone of her voice. “How has your new job been? Or can’t you tell me?” 

“It’s been hard, but I’m getting better,” he said vaguely. “You were right about the lawyer thing, though. But I’m all right now, I really am.” That was not, strictly speaking, true, but it was close enough for government work. He didn’t think his parents wanted to hear about his personal life that much, in any event. 

“You’ve been eating better, I hope,” his mother sniffed. “I worry now that I’m not there to make sure you eat something other than kids’ breakfast cereal.”

“Don’t worry about that, Mom,” he told her, oddly glad to hear her chiding him again. “Besides, you’ll be happy to hear that I’ve started wearing suits.” 

“Will miracles never cease,” Leia said. “Your father wants to talk to you.” There had been a soft murmur on the other hand, and then his father was speaking to him on the other end of the phone line. 

“Congratulations on your firearms certification, son,” Han had said without preamble. 

“Have you been abusing your clearance again, Dad?” Ren asked him a little suspiciously. He did not know what exactly his father was cleared for or what exactly he did for the US government when he wasn’t being a cultural attaché, but he knew enough to know that Han Solo didn’t always need to know the things he knew about.

“I always need to know where you’re concerned, Ben,” Han said, slightly huffily. “You’re my son.”

“Okay, Dad,” Ren conceded, “I guess you know what I’m doing, then. Can you tell Mom I’ll be okay?” 

“I don’t know all the details, but I know you work with Nicole Phasma. Trust her, kiddo, she’s a good hand in the field.” 

“Yeah, she’s a good trainer too,” Ren said, thinking back to that afternoon’s sparring match and how good her praise had felt after the terrifying experience of disarming her. 

“Yeah?” His father sounded proud, but Ren wasn’t sure who Han was proud of, Phasma or him. “I’ve only been on the teaching end of that equation, but she’s a good kid. And that Englishman, he’s good, I hope?”

It surprised him at first that his father had not pulled up Hux’s dossier for a peek, and then he thought of how the authorities in Vauxhall were probably more resistant to Han Solo’s brand of chicanery. “I think he’s scarier than Phasma.”

“Impossible,” Han scoffed. “He may seem more intimidating than Phasma, but he’s not her, and besides, the fact that you’d say that means you haven’t seen her at her scariest yet. Pray you don’t.”

“Okay, Dad,” Ren laughed, “if you say so.” He paused. “Have you or Mom heard from Uncle Luke, yet?”

“Not a peep,” Han said, a little sadly. “I have no idea why he’s so upset about you working for Langley - he never gave me any trouble for it.” 

“It’s okay, Dad.” Ren sighed sadly. He owed his passion for art and his interests in architecture to his Uncle Luke, and their falling-out in March had been profoundly unpleasant. Even now he felt a pang of baffled guilt, sure that something he had said or done had provoked that cold-shouldered silence. 

“Well, you be good,” Han said, sensing the mood. “I’ll hand you back to your Mom, now.” With that Ren’s mother had retaken the phone, and they had chatted about more trivial matters such as the family dogs and the weather in Boston until his work phone had become too hot to hold against his ear.

The talk helped his frustration and loneliness somewhat, but it also aggravated his homesickness, and Ren had gone to bed alone that night wondering if Hux, in the next room, was homesick too. After all, Ren was only four hundred and forty miles from home, but at least he still shared the same continent as his hometown, whereas Hux was now on the other side of an entire ocean from London. Ren hesitated then, realized that he was probably being very American for assuming that Hux was a native Londoner, that England was more than its capital. And then he had growled and rolled away from the wall they shared, trying not to think of his aggravating colleague and housemate. _Why am I spending all this time thinking about that asshole,_ Ren thought, _when he won’t even give me the time of day?_

The answer eluded him, and he only managed to fall asleep well past midnight.

\---

“I’ve got good news and interesting news,” Phasma had told them a week later, apropos of nothing as they had returned to their office after lunch. “Firstly, Ren, you are now officially a field agent. Congratulations, you’re keeping your contract.” Phasma smiled brightly at Ren, who felt his ears start to heat up as he slouched in his chair. “Secondly,” she said, “now that you’re a field agent, we have an assignment.”

“Do share,” Hux had said from his desk, and Phasma placed a dossier before her on the desk, smiled again. 

“How would you two feel about visiting Luxembourg?” she asked, and Ren had to bite his lip then to not squeal like a kid at the excitement he felt. This was it, he thought, what he had really signed up for, the chance at dashing espionage and field work, to perhaps be more like his grandfather Anakin Skywalker.

And then Phasma had continued her explanation, and Ren had had to bite his lip again so as not to show the sheer disappointment he felt as she and Hux ruthlessly popped his illusions one by one. 

“This is our mark,” Phasma said, handing a photograph to Hux, who glanced at it for a few moments, and then passed it to Ren. The person depicted was a striking woman in her thirties, with smooth black hair and warm brown eyes. She looked oddly tired in the photograph, which had been taken at quite a distance through a telephoto lens. “Émelie Frehner, aged 34. French-speaking Swiss citizen, born in Basel to a French-Vietnamese mother and a Swiss father. Current abode is Zurich, where she works as an accountant and financial advisor to some rather powerful, private individuals.”

“Powerful, private individuals whose financial details Langley wishes to know?” Hux asked as he took the dossier from Phasma’s desk, started to flip idly through it. 

“Exactly,” Phasma took the photograph back from Ren and drummed her fingers on her desk as Hux read. 

Ren frowned a little. “Why us, then?” he asked. “Isn’t this sort of thing that other agents do already?” 

“Yes, but doing it via dreamshare means it’s untraceable,” Hux said as he looked up from the dossier. 

“Besides, it’s not like we’re going to dump you in the middle of Yemen and expect you to survive for your first mission,” Phasma grinned. “Think of this as a test run, a real, official test run, not the little training runs we’ve been doing in Snoke’s lab.”

“Right,” Ren frowned faintly as the geographical details failed to match up. “We’re going to Luxembourg, but our mark lives in Zurich?” 

“She’s going to a conference in Luxembourg City, and we suspect she’ll also be meeting clandestinely with one or more of her clients while she’s there,” Phasma said. “This also means she’s not on home ground. She’ll be easier to case and approach, and we can go in unarmed because nobody else will be armed in Luxembourg.”

“Have we been ordered to try a specific approach, or...?” Hux asked as he looked down at the dossier again.

“Nope. We get to choose how to do it, as long as we get the information as privately as we can. Emphasis on private,” she said with a sharp glance in Ren’s direction, one that he felt was unfair. 

“Hm.” Hux tapped a finger on a page in the dossier. “This says that she’s recently divorced.” 

“February of this year,” Phasma said smoothly. It was as though she had already memorized its contents. “She caught her ex-husband, _Herr_ Herzog, in his secretary’s embrace, so I hear.”

“What?” Ren spluttered, remembering Frehner’s long black hair, and those dark eyes. There had been lines crinkling at their corners, but that had not detracted from her appeal, only lent her a vague sadness that made him feel all the more protective and chivalrous towards her. “But she’s gorgeous.”

“Well, her loss is our gain,” Hux said archly, “lovely though she is.” He looked up from the dossier again, caught Phasma’s gaze. “I think Ms. Frehner needs to meet Rory.”

“Who’s Rory?” Ren asked even as Phasma nodded, and Hux had folded up the dossier and handed it back to Phasma before he started on his explanation. 

“I am,” Hux said as he stretched out his long legs in front of him, the eyelets on his spectator boots gleaming subtly under the room’s lights. “More precisely, Rory is a persona I wear whenever I’m required to be the bait in a honey trap.” 

“You, a honey trap?” Ren could think of several things that were wrong with the idea. “Firstly, you’re the least approachable man I’ve ever met, even if you dress better than James Bond. Secondly, aren’t you gay?” 

Hux narrowed his eyes at Ren. “Firstly,” he said, counting his retorts off on his fingers, “the modern James Bond is a poseur. Nowadays he gets his suits off-rack from Tom Ford, not Savile Row. And thank you for your fine assessment of my character, but most people find Rory exceedingly approachable. Secondly, I do prefer the company of gentlemen most of the time, yes, but there have been exceptions.”

“What kinds of exceptions?” Ren asked, and then immediately regretted asking that question.

“Lucky ones,” Hux shrugged, as though commenting on the weather, his composure smooth and unbreakable. 

“Okay, then,” Ren said, even as he thought darkly on how unlucky he was. “Why you as the bait, then, and not me?”

“You were looking at Frehner’s photo, Ren,” Phasma said. “How did you feel when we mentioned she was divorced?”

“A little sad, I guess,” Ren shrugged, probing carefully at the complicated mass of feelings knotted somewhere in his belly, finding jealousy and envy, sadness, and always that frustration that came from being around Hux. “Kind of, I don’t know, a little protective?” 

“To sum it up, you felt some kind of emotion towards her,” Phasma continued.

“Yeah.” Ren nodded. “So?” 

“You can’t afford that in this line of work,” Phasma said. “Hux has trained for this. He can go in and act like her dream lover while being mostly detached from his feelings. You can’t, not yet, and playing such a role fucks people up, even if they have the training.” _Even if you have the training,_ Ren thought glumly, wondered if that was why Hux was such a cold unfeeling bastard.

“This job is going to eventually leave you bitter and cynical like us,” Hux said wistfully, his expression almost thoughtful. “Let’s not hurry it along, shall we?” 

Or, maybe, Ren thought then, it was just that Hux thought he was still too young, too inexperienced, incapable of ever being a suitable lover.

 _Too late about that cynicism,_ Ren wanted to say, and then he met Hux’s gaze, glanced at Phasma, and wondered if he wanted to know more about the hard distance he sometimes glimpsed in them from time to time. Perhaps they were right.

\---

Hux lay on top of his bed in his hotel room in Luxembourg, dressed but shoeless on top of the sheets. He had done a lot of jobs in his life that were a mad scramble from beginning to end, but for the next 48 hours or so, he had nothing better to do than, quite literally, lie here and wait for his beard to grow. Rory affected two or three days’ stubble at all times, if not more.

This was an indulgence that normally would have been unnecessary, almost impossible for Hux to countenance. But Rory enjoyed life’s little luxuries. So Rory he would be, and he would stack up all of the pillows and lounge, and have a bath in the enormous hotel tub, and read through the contents of his Kindle, and feel himself more at home in what was not really his own skin.

Rory had first come into being while he was working for Vauxhall, fairly early on. He had based Rory strongly on one of his distaff cousins, learned to affect his easy smile and careless charm, and then built an entire legend around that core of easygoing friendliness. 

In contrast to Hux’s usual self, Rory was Irish through and through. His last name was Gallagher, one of the most common surnames in County Donegal, where he hailed from, and he had a ready set of responses to the tired old jokes about his name. He spoke with a softened version of the accent Hux had learned at his mother’s knee but chose not to use. Rory was Catholic, a former altar boy, albeit not very observant in his adult life. Nevertheless, he wore a tiny gold crucifix on a fine chain around his neck, and it would glint against the hollow of his throat in the open collar of his shirts. Rory hated neckties, dressed well but not absolutely formally, and he was most definitely not a polished public school alumnus. Everyone liked Rory. Most people, in fact, liked Rory very much indeed.

Hux liked to play Rory as hesitantly bicurious to male marks, innocently tactile, just a little handsy. It always worked as intrigue grew into attraction, and that attraction fed the overwhelming desire to corrupt and despoil this nice Irish Catholic boy. Most of his marks had reacted to his feigned awkwardness in bed with a distinct ardor that had been very enjoyable despite the cold premeditation in the entrapment. 

His approach with women was wholly different, presenting instead with a slightly stiff chivalry that would thaw on further acquaintance to reveal the essential warmth of Rory’s personality. There would often be a sad story - a broken engagement or a car accident, a dead wife - to explain the distance, and his gradual thaw would then read as emergence from sadness into a kind of healing. It was the stuff of Mills and Boon novels, but the devil of it was that it had nearly a 100% success rate.

While it was true, also, that Hux found himself more usually attracted to men than women, he considered himself somewhere around a five on the Kinsey Scale, and had not been lying about lucky exceptions. Nevertheless Rory had taken partners Hux had not strictly been attracted to, and he had found that he had enjoyed the guile and the play as he reeled them further into his trap. And then, later, he had greatly enjoyed pleasing them, pleasuring them, demonstrating his skills even through his ever-present detachment. It was rather a performative sort of thing, he thought, and he had laughed once about how service-oriented his mindset had been even as he took his own satisfaction from something so calculated and cynical. 

He had thought it only fair that he tried to give his marks a good time - everything in his performances as Rory involved building their ideal fantasy, luring them in and then delivering on the promise. Besides, most of his marks were going to have their lives thoroughly destroyed once he had obtained the information he needed, and that usually left him wanting to at least compensate them in the bedchamber.

Hux had skipped his usual haircut two weeks ago in preparation for the role, let his hair grow just a little shaggier than its normal length, procured a pair of off-rack suits and had them altered minimally, just to fit. He had followed those up with a few casuals, a pair of calfskin loafers which he broke in carefully while Phasma had planned the mission logistics and Ren had built dream layouts. The last two elements of Rory’s dress Hux already owned - a bottle of Dior Eau Sauvage, and a tiny gold crucifix no larger than his thumbnail, on a simple chain. 

The crucifix had belonged to his mother, Katherine. It had been a Confirmation gift from her own mother Brigid, his maternal grandmother, and she had worn it for most of her life. Hux had inherited it upon her death nine years ago, but he had already left the Catholic Church at that point in his life. He had only retrieved it to wear a year after he had started work at Vauxhall, when he had codified Rory’s character and mannerisms in his head. It had lived in a niche in his dressing case ever since, with a pair of Tiffany&Co silver-and-enamel cufflinks that she had given him for his 21st birthday.

The crucifix had helped him remember himself every time he stepped into Rory’s skin, and that had in turn helped him stay in character, remembering his mother’s warmth and love and her accent. Rory was, Hux felt, in a sense what he might have been had she left his father and had the raising of him. He wished she had. Perhaps it might have saved them both.

She had sold the house in Sussex and moved to Oxford at his suggestion after his father had died in the year he turned sixteen, but it had not healed her. She had continued drinking despite his attempts at intervention, and it had eventually caught up with her health. 

She had been admitted to hospital for what he knew would be the final time in the fourth year of his studies at Cambridge. He had studied for his impending exams while he sat in her hospital room, waited at her side, in the faint hope that she would wake up and ask for him. 

Katherine’s fair skin had turned greenish-yellow from jaundice, her belly swollen with fluid from ascites. Hux knew, at that point in his education, that if he pulled back the blanket and pulled up her gown, that he would also find the telltale _caput medusae_ of superficial veins distended from portal hypertension. He had volunteered as a live donor for a partial liver transplant when her health had been better, but antigen testing had come up largely incompatible. Bhreandáin Hux was simply too much his abhorred father’s son, and he had raged when the results had come back, punched a wall until his knuckles bruised and bled. 

But his rage had helped as little as anything else. His mother’s liver cirrhosis had decompensated. She grew too weak to survive the procedure of liver transplantation. With her consent the care she was receiving had shifted from lifesaving measures designed to bridge to liver transplantation, to palliative care designed to ease her dying. 

Hux had moved into her hospital room after that, returning from classes to read and study at her side, snatch a quick meal and a cup of tea in the hospital cafeteria. He would snatch a few hours’ sleep in a chair by her bed, and return to their empty house only to shower and change before he went to classes again. He had become used to the hush growing every time he entered a lecture hall late, his instructors’ sad indulgence and pity, even as the berg of his grief had calved from his personal glacier of pain and drifted off into an ocean unmapped, gray with uncertainty and waiting and futile hope. 

A priest, one of the hospital chaplains, had given Katherine last rites two days ago when she had still been lucid enough to confess and recite the Apostle’s Creed. Hux had reflexively murmured along with her as her voice had faltered in and out of the prayer, and he had helped her sit upright when Father Talbot had given her Communion for the last time, after she had been anointed in the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. 

She had fallen wearily asleep after that, a vague smile on her face, and Hux had held her hand carefully, gently, trying not to bruise her. She bruised so easily now that she was this close to death, and she sometimes bled from the insertion point where the IV cannula entered her veins, because her failing liver no longer produced enough clotting factors for her own body’s needs. Her hair was now the only part of her that looked alive, gleaming glorious copper-red from the thin cotton of her pillowcase. 

He had sat beside her on that last night, going through his notes for pediatrics, flipping through his textbook, when she woke confused and frightened at 3.30 AM. “It’s okay, mum,” he had told her as her eyes had opened, but she had only flinched weakly and called out. 

“Da?” she asked, confused, and Hux had shut his eyes against the pain and brushed her hair out of her eyes. 

“No, mum. It’s me, Bhreandáin, your boy,” he told her, trying to keep his voice calm. Delirium was a common symptom of hepatic encephalopathy, he knew from his textbooks, but the wild fear in her eyes tore at him, gouged him hollow as he tried to soothe her back to sleep. 

_Dear God in heaven,_ he prayed for the first time in eight years, the last time in his life. _Please, Father, let her go back to sleep. Let her pass soon, in peace. Let it be painless. Please._ He had continued to stroke her head gently, and she had eventually slipped back into unconsciousness. 

His mother’s breathing grew steadily more labored, weaker as the minutes ticked by, as Hux sat beside her, notes and pediatrics textbook forgotten as he sensed the fraying thread of her life. He had stroked the fingernails of her left hand carefully, afraid to hold her hand for fear of bruising and hurting her, and she had felt so cold to the touch. They had remained like that, mother and son, until two hours later, when she had gasped weakly in her sleep. 

“Mum?” he had asked her, in case it had been another waking, but she did not open her eyes. She let out a strange, rushing breath, and then gasped again, and he had felt at her neck for her pulse. Her heart fluttered slowly, a mere tremble under his fingertips, and he leaned in close, whispered. “Mum. It’s okay. It’s okay to go. I love you, mum.” And then Katherine had let out that second breath in a weary sigh that ended on a brief rattle, and her heart faltered to a stop as he kissed her on the forehead one last time. 

Hux stood staring and dry-eyed afterwards, looking out the window in her hospital room as a doctor and two nurses came in to confirm her death, and outside he could hear the Angelus bells ringing faintly, softly from a nearby church. Amen, he thought but did not say. Thank God for small mercies - because small mercies were the only ones he had ever known in his life. 

Her funeral had been a simple, straightforward affair. Hux had chosen for her to be buried back in County Donegal, near her childhood home in Lifford, citing her (and his) Catholicism as an excuse. He could not bear the thought of having her buried in Sussex, lying forever next to his father, the husband who had taken so much from her and who had driven her to drink herself to death. 

The only relatives who attended had been her family, the Sheridans, and Hux had allowed himself to cry desperately, disgracefully into his grandfather Patrick’s shoulder. It had been the only time he had allowed himself to grieve publicly for her, and it had helped even as he recognized that his grandfather was doing something a parent should rightly never have to do - mourning for the death of his own child. 

Hux had wanted so much to like the Sheridans more, but they were devout Catholics, every one of them, and it had hurt him to know that they would never accept his personal life and apostasy at all. He had met his cousin Eamon then, the son of Katherine’s older brother Colin. Eamon, out of all of them, had been the closest to understanding Hux’s dilemma. 

“I’m hardly the best Catholic in Ireland,” Eamon had shrugged as they had talked over shots of pot-still whiskey one evening. “And besides, I’m not the Pope, so nothing I say is _ex cathedra,_ but I’ve always felt that it would be a very petty, angry God to condemn an entire swath of humanity just because of who they fancy, and I like to think that He’s possibly bigger than that.”

“You can’t be a bad Catholic,” Hux had laughed bitterly. “You went to seminary.”

“I went to seminary,” Eamon agreed, “And I dropped out. And now here I am selling drafty, inauthentic cottages to bloody Americans who want to romanticize living like a starving cottier. Listen, Bren. Stay in England and stick with the doctoring. It’s probably less humiliating than what I’m doing now.”

He had remembered Eamon’s self-deprecating warmth and candour when it came time to build Rory’s personality and mannerisms - remembered how he had managed to put his young cousin at as much ease as he could attain with all his raw and broken edges. That was the sort of person other people wanted to be around. Not him, cold and detached and hiding nothing but the shattered and empty glass of his heart. Not a man who couldn’t even cry for his own mother.

Rory cried for Katherine, now and then. He had his emotions closer to the surface, and if a mark should ask about the pendant, and his eyes should happen to well up a little as he told them about his beloved, much lamented mother and how lonely he’d been without her… it could only add emotional authenticity. And Rory on the edge of tears was candy to a certain subset.

But it always felt strange, later, to realise that he had told so much of the truth to someone who knew absolutely nothing else true about him, and to know that he was more authentic pretending to be someone else than he was being himself.

\---

Émelie Frehner arrived in Luxembourg City a day after Hux, Ren and Phasma had, and they had let her cool her heels in her hotel room for an evening before Hux had put on Rory’s face and contrived to meet her.

Rory had shocked Ren the first time he had emerged from his hotel room in full disguise. His Burberry suit was the color of buckskin, the jacket tailored with more emphasis on chest and shoulders than anything Hux had worn previously. He had paired the suit with a striped shirt that Ren had recognized, white with a subtle gray-green striping, but silk knots had replaced his formerly omnipresent cufflinks. Rory wore no necktie and left the collar of his shirt open to expose a sharp V of skin and the hollow of his throat, where a tiny gold crucifix gleamed. 

Most disconcerting of all, however, were the eyes. Hux had, in the process of changing into Rory’s clothes, also put on a pair of colored contacts, and his eyes were now a warm hazel-green. His hair was purposefully tousled, hanging loosely over his brow, and the stubble had softened the narrow lines of his jaw and his sensual mouth. Ren had started to understand, then, just how much more approachable Rory Gallagher was than Bren Hux ever would be. 

Rory was tactile, touchable, and he invited the closeness. He had smelled different too, not his previous arm’s-length chill of pine incense and birch and the strange clean coldness of air before a snowfall, but rather a strong, clean hit of bitter lemon and rosemary fading down to a sensual, almost feminine air of jasmine and roses, sandalwood on a woodsy vetiver base. That perfume had lent him a powerful allure, something very different from the authoritative, sexy confidence that Hux had radiated as himself. Ren felt himself longing to lean in close to Rory, to learn the details of the scent, and was suddenly very glad that he wasn’t the mark, about to have this guided missile of a man deployed at him.

It seemed like a terrible shame that all of this was going to be wasted on a woman Hux didn’t even particularly want to sleep with. Ren had a sudden wild, mad urge to yell something about volunteering as tribute, and it was only the way Phasma was watching him that made him stand up straight, stick his hands in his pockets and let Rory pass without a word.

They had separate appointments, the both of them. Ren would linger as an unofficial tail to keep an eye on Rory and the mark, and Rory would himself arrange a brief meeting with her, with Phasma’s assistance. 

Ren gave Rory a few minutes’ head start by stopping for a paper cup of coffee, and he had sipped it slowly and watched as Rory pulled his conference pass and lanyard from a pocket and tucked it around his neck. _Rory Gallagher_ , it had read, _Allied Irish Banks._ It was a legitimate pass acquired through a small amount of inveigling - some planted references here and there, a little help from Vauxhall, and a sudden job history pulled out of thin air for his new career as a financial advisor.

He sauntered carefully towards the hotel hosting the conference, and Ren had pulled his own credentials out and tucked them around his neck. He was wearing a necktie today - Hux had insisted, and lent him a champagne-colored silk necktie in a foulard print, and it had gleamed faintly against one of his gray shirts as he pretended to drink from his cup of coffee as security checked his pass and waved him through. 

Ren could see Frehner, several yards ahead of Rory in the crowd, when Phasma, striding briskly as though late for an event, had bumped into her and sent her stumbling to her knees. Phasma dropped her folder, and loose sheets of paper had fallen out of it to land at their feet. 

“Excuse me,” Phasma said, apologetically, as she helped Frehner up. “I’m dreadfully sorry.” 

Frehner had simply nodded stiffly, her irritation obvious even through her impeccable manners, and she had stepped back into the crowd as Phasma had knelt to pick her papers up. She finished picking her documents up and stood up just as Rory passed her. Their hands touched briefly, and Ren was surprised at the grace which with they performed the brush-pass. 

Ren would have missed it himself if he had not known what to look for, but there it was. Phasma had palmed Frehner’s wallet almost invisibly to Rory, who had knelt down as though to pick something up. 

“Is this yours?” he had asked her in a subtly lilting Irish accent, and Phasma had shaken her head. 

“No, my wallet’s right here -” she said, and then Rory was straightening up, quickening his pace as Ren walked anonymously by Phasma, pushed ahead with the crowd. 

“Excuse me,” Rory called as he neared Frehner. “Excuse me, Miss,” he said, “I believe this belongs to you.” 

Frehner slowed, glanced up at him with her great dark eyes, and then patted one of her pockets. “It does, yes,” she said slowly in good but accented English. “ _Merci,_ Mr. -” Her gaze dropped to Rory’s conference pass, but she waited for him to introduce himself. 

“Gallagher,” Rory said, and then he smiled a little shyly, turned away from her gaze. “Rory Gallagher.”

“ _Merci beaucoup,_ Mr. Gallagher,” she said as she took her wallet from his hand. Their fingertips brushed. 

_My God,_ Ren thought bitterly as he passed them, half-empty cup of coffee still in his hand, _he’s a total man-whore._ Phasma passed him then as he paused by a trash bin to finish drinking his coffee, deposited the paper cup into the bin as he watched Rory and Frehner pass him. 

“Émelie, please,” she was saying to Rory, “call me Émelie.”

“Only if you’ll call me Rory, as well,” Rory said lightly. “Mr. Gallagher always makes me think someone wants to talk to my father.” 

Ren’s guts started to churn then, and he blamed the black coffee he had gulped, still-hot, to maintain his cover and not look like an obvious tail. _I should have ordered a latte,_ he thought as he watched them enter one of the seminar halls. _This is the last time I’m ever drinking black coffee again._

That part of his job done, Ren headed towards one of the smaller seminar rooms, patting his pockets before he stopped and mouthed a soundless oath. He then spun on his tail and walked briskly out of the hotel as though in a hurry to retrieve something he had forgotten, and almost half-ran back to his hotel room. 

_I think it’s working,_ Phasma messaged him while he had removed his shoes in his room, _they’re sitting next to each other and she hasn’t moved away._

_Wonderful,_ he texted back glumly, as he took his suit jacket off and hung it up on a hanger in his room closet, _glad to know our own pocket gigolo is earning his keep. What’s next?_

 _I have to sit through this fucking boring seminar, that’s what. Let’s hope she decides to play hooky with Rory. I’ll message you when we need you again._ It amused Ren somewhat that Phasma swore more in text and email than she did verbally - it was as though her f-bombs came only in typographical form. 

_Thank fuck I had to make that exit,_ he sent back as he rolled back his sleeves, _I’d die of boredom if I had to sit through that lecture._

A last message buzzed on his burner phone as he loosened his necktie and unbuttoned his shirt collar. At least now he no longer felt as though he was being strangled by an angry animated ribbon. 

He looked back down at his phone and groaned aloud as Phasma’s message blinked onto his screen. _And I’d have more paperwork to fill out, so keep your skinny ass alive._

Alive. Living was not the problem right now, Ren grumbled to himself, it was finding the will to live through the rest of this job as the world’s worst stage crew at some experimental off-off-Broadway performance.

\---

As it turned out, Émelie Frehner had not chosen to play hooky with Rory. She had left the conference two hours early instead, citing a prior commitment.

 _She’s going to meet a client,_ Hux had texted Phasma, but we’re not going to tail her, _because she’s having drinks with Rory this evening._ Phasma had shown the message to Ren as they shared a late lunch together in his hotel room. Lunch had been _Judd mat Gaardebounen_ , slices of boiled smoked pork served atop beans and boiled potatoes. Ren had barely tasted anything on his plate as he picked at the broad beans, and then the pork. He knew that he was doing Luxembourg’s national dish a great injustice, but this reminded him too much of his Uncle Luke’s cooking, which tended towards “boil everything together and then just plate it together”. Besides, he was still feeling a vague heartburn from the coffee earlier in the day, and it had left him somewhat unwilling to eat. 

“If he’s free,” Ren said, meaning Hux, “then why doesn’t he come have lunch with us while Frehner’s busy?” 

“It’s easier for him to stay in character if he doesn’t have to get in and out of it.” Phasma said as she cut a boiled potato in half, speared it on her fork. “Besides, we don’t want him to be seen with us in public, in case anyone gets any ideas.” She ate the potato then, and followed it up with a sip from her glass of Moselle. 

“Makes sense,” Ren muttered, before he, too had taken a sip of his wine. The Riesling was tart and crisp, breath of lychee and flowers on his palate, and it seemed to jolt his appetite awake with its dryness. “Phasma,” he said, putting his glass down while he nudged at his beans thoughtfully, “you said this kind of thing fucks up people even with the training.”

“It can, yeah,” she said quietly, more serious than she had been before. It was odd, Ren thought, how her eyes seemed to darken with her mood. Perhaps it was just the way she lowered her eyelids, veiled her gaze with her pale eyelashes. 

“Then…” Ren hesitated, tried to find the words. “What are we going to do if Hux comes back from this fucked-up?” 

“You ask the question like it’s never happened to other agents before.” Phasma impaled the remaining half of her potato on her fork, ate it before continuing. “Hux worked for Vauxhall for five years before he came to work with us. He’s done this on and off for four years, and he’s probably experienced every way a honey trap can go wrong short of getting killed. The usual thing we do is to give the agent in question some time off after every assignment, refer them to internal counselling if they still aren’t themselves after that leave time.”

Ren ate some of his broad beans then, a morsel of his pork. It tasted a little better now. “What goes wrong in a honey trap?” he asked Phasma. 

“Think of the ways things can go wrong on a date, and raise the stakes,” she told him. “Some of the people we have to bait are nasty people. Nasty people can sometimes have very unpleasant personal lives. Other times the agent gets emotionally involved and we have to pull them before they compromise opsec. Sometimes, they get emotionally involved, and then something bad happens, and that’s pretty much a surefire recipe for trauma therapy and several months off work. Sometimes the mark figures out what’s going on, and our agent doesn’t come back at all.”

“That’s not going to be a risk in this one, is it?” Ren asked, suddenly terribly aware of the amount of risk Hux took upon himself in volunteering to bait the trap. _Four years,_ he thought, _what does four years of that do to someone?_ Ren tried to run his mind through the permutations, the concomitant effects, and none of them were pleasant. 

“Oh, hell no,” Phasma had laughed brittly, “Émelie Frehner may have dubious choice in clients, but nothing about her profile says that she’s going to turn out to be a roofie-pushing serial killer. The worst Hux is going to run into here is that he can’t get it up, and he can use Rory’s Catholicism as an excuse.”

The brilliance of the crucifix registered suddenly on Ren’s mind, not only as an excuse, but what it also signified to a mark - repressed desire, moral proscriptions made to be transgressed. “... That’s a really good excuse.”

“He’s thought a lot about this, you know,” Phasma shrugged. “You can tell.”

“Yeah. I can tell now. Jesus,” Ren breathed, stunned by the calculation present in every facet of Rory’s dress, personality and presentation. 

Phasma drained her wineglass then, poured herself another glass of Moselle River Riesling. “No, Ren,” she said after putting the bottle down, “that’s for Rory to be saying, provided we - and he - get lucky tonight.”

\---

Émelie Frehner had made an appointment to meet Rory in the bar of her hotel at nine, and he had shown up promptly enough, and taken a seat at the bar, waiting idly for her to come down from her hotel room. Phasma had been notified beforehand, and she had taken the opportunity to set herself and Ren in a booth set perpendicularly opposite of the bar itself so she could keep an eye on Rory.

“Why do we have to sit here and watch him do this, again?” Ren had asked as he sat himself down in front of Phasma. Together like this they looked almost like friends, colleagues, lovers, perhaps, talking seriously over cups of coffee. 

“He’s not wearing a wire,” Phasma said softly, as she kept her eyes on Rory, “so I can’t listen in on him in case he needs help, but I can lipread. He can signal me from there, too.”

That felt odd to Ren as he poured sugar into his coffee cup, stirred it and followed it with cream. “Why isn’t he wearing a wire?” he asked.

Phasma’s shoulders rose, fell in a soft snort as she laughed a little at Ren’s question. “Because it’s going to be hard to explain why he has a mic taped to him under his shirt if Émelie drags him up to her room and tears his clothes off after drinks tonight,” she said.

“What a slut,” Ren breathed softly as he stirred his coffee, watched Rory speaking briefly to the bartender on duty. 

“Ahem,” Phasma said, her expression hardening minutely. “We can’t exactly blame her for falling for our bait. Not when he does it so well.”

“I mean him,” Ren clarified belatedly, took an experimental sip to cover his chagrin at having offended her. The coffee was still a little too hot, but acceptably un-coffee-like now that he had added cream and sugar to it. 

“Still not a term I’d like you to use again, Ren, but you can’t blame him either. He’s just doing it for the job,” Phasma said before she turned her head away from him. 

Ren traced Phasma’s glance, looked behind his shoulder briefly and saw that Émelie Frehner had come down from the lobby into the plushly-carpeted bar. She crossed into his field of vision and he noticed that she had taken off her suit jacket and let down her hair, and the warm light picked out golden highlights in her eyes and complexion. She smiled as Rory greeted her with another warm handshake, and then perched herself on the barstool facing him, turning away from Ren and Phasma in their booth.

 _She is lovely,_ he thought, _she really is. Herzog was an idiot to cheat on her._ In that moment he felt oddly sorry for her despite her ethical failings, and realized that he, Phasma and Hux would more likely be the bad guys if the situation had been dramatized and written into a movie script. And then Rory favored her with a soft look, the linger of his eyes obvious on what Ren presumed to be the open neckline of her blouse, and Ren took a deep breath, looked down so it wouldn’t look like he was staring. 

He could still see with his peripheral vision, however, and he had learned early in his drawing classes to focus in on details on the edges of his field of view. Rory was talking to Frehner, his voice low and intimate. He gestured at himself, patted his flat belly briefly, and then laughed charmingly. Ren tried to remember if he had ever heard Hux laugh like that before, thought not as Frehner laughed too, her voice light and silvery and smooth as the bartender handed them their drinks - a vodka gimlet for Rory, and a Bellini for her.

Ren did not have to be able to hear what Rory was saying to grasp the thought behind that gesture - _get her thinking about his body, the shape he’s in._ Ren remembered very clearly the shape Hux was in, lean and smoothly muscled, viciously strong in a violent, wiry way that had reminded Ren of a documentary he had once watched, of a stoat killing a rabbit ten times its size. Hux was in no way short at 6’1”, but his slenderness always made him look smaller in waistcoat and shirtsleeves than he did with his coat on.

God, the way Rory was looking at Frehner, his gaze soft yet intense, not so much undressing her with his eyes as much as indirectly caressing the bones of her face, her hair. Ren could almost imagine Hux looking at someone like that, someone who would probably never be him. “What is he saying?” Ren asked Phasma at last, as his limited patience evaporated. 

Phasma shook her head, sipped at her black coffee. “I don’t think you really want to know,” she said as she put her cup down. “Besides, that probably falls under kiss-and-tell, and he wouldn’t. I’m not going to do it for him.”

Ren wanted to growl in frustration. Instead he picked up his own coffee cup and took a long pull from it, swallowed hard. He could still hear them conversing indistinctly to his right, and he snuck another glance as he put his cup down on its saucer. Frehner was leaning in close to Rory, her head tilted as he whispered something soft and intimate to her, and he saw the hints of a flush beneath the warm golden tan of her skin, creeping up the edge of her collar, on the backs of her ears. 

Ren could guess then what Rory was telling Émelie Frehner from the way she listened, from the growing flush on her skin, and he tried to keep his facial expression neutral, tried not to let his own consternation show. He could not watch this any more, could not imagine this conversation for all the pain it was causing, twisting like a knot in his gut and liver.

“Please try not to stare, Ren,” Phasma said patiently to him, and he had looked away gratefully and turned to her. No good, he realized - he could still see them out of his peripheral vision. “Draw something,” she continued, and he looked down at the closed sketchbook on the table beside his left elbow, picked it up and uncapped his pen. 

Ren started on a fresh page, tried to doodle, but found himself unconsciously capturing Rory’s avid gaze, the intensity and the anticipation in his face as he had talked to Frehner. _Fuck._ Ren tried again, wound up drawing a gestural study of Rory’s carefully casual lean on the bar. _No._ He had been about to rip the page out of his sketchbook and try again, but he stopped, turned the page back instead. 

He had been about to rip out the abortive lines of poetry he had attempted to write in the airplane. He gazed at it a few moments more, at the study of Arlington on the previous page in soft graphite, thought again of his grandfather’s reinterment in the summer of 1995, of the heat and humidity and the sweet mercy of shade under the full boughs of the cherry trees. 

Mercy. 

The words came slowly, haltingly, and then his writing picked up speed as he thought of the coolness of shadow, the smell of trimmed grass and fresh earth and a warm breeze against his skin. How his mother and his Uncle Luke had both worn black, and how his father Han had held an umbrella over his head, to shade him. He thought of the colors still bright in his mind’s eye, a silent hurricane eye of serenity in the pain and frustration that lurked still in his mind and soul. 

_a mercy, that the summer breeze is light,_  
_the willow leaves above me softly green;_  
_a mercy, that the sky is clear and bright,_  
_its blue untouched by any cloudy sheen._  
_a mercy, that i lie here quietly,_  
_no sound as sunlight warms me gently through;_

Rory threw his head back then with a sudden bark of laughter, rocking back on his barstool, and the fragile calm of Arlington fled Ren’s head, threatened by a sudden spike of adrenaline up his spine, and Ren bit down on the cap of his pen hard enough to deform the plastic. 

_God, he thought, why doesn’t Hux just bayonet me now, put me out of my misery?_ It wasn’t as though it hadn’t happened before - Hux had shot him so many times in dreamshare training, slit his throat one memorable time in their Tueller drill sessions. And then it struck him, a slow-motion drop of realization where everything stood frozen around him: this was what mercy was truly about - this was where the poem was going. He put pen to paper again, scrawled two more lines in a sudden fury. 

_a mercy, too, that there should only be_  
_one shadow, by my head, and kneeling: you._

Death was the only mercy Hux had chosen to grant him - the smallest of mercies, he thought, the meanest of blessings. 

_oh, shadow, you have come at last to see_  
_the life i'm pouring out upon the ground,_  
_to help me leave this world more peacefully_  
_than with the bullet that my heart has found._

Death, Ren realized, was the only mercy he could ever expect to look forward to - that would be all he could wring from Hux’s pitiless heart. He wrote the last two lines then, a sudden taste of salt in his mouth, pricking in his eyes, and the words blurred as he wrote them, blurred under the drops of moisture that had fallen from his eyes. 

_the bayonet is sharp. i barely feel_  
_your mercy, but i know that it is real._

There. It was done. It had hurt to write - hurt like ripping a part of himself away, like tearing sutures open, but it had left him oddly calm, hollow. As though he had just given birth to some malformed creature that had been assailing him from within in some terrible travail.

Birth. Ren wanted to laugh at himself. No, this was less a birth and more the gory chestburster scene from _Alien._ This verse had torn itself free of him, and he would soon bleed to death inside, he thought, his feelings strangulating, hurting from lack of blood flow before they withered away entirely. 

_Let’s not hurry it along, shall we?_ Hux had said a little over two weeks ago, citing the encroaching cynicism of the job, the calculation in it. Ren sighed briefly as he stared at the sonnet in his sketchbook. He could feel the bitterness and cynicism already within him, wondered at the manner of its arrival. Something so quick needed no hurrying at all.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rory's honey trap goes entirely too right, and Ren learns his limits. In dreams he pushes Hux over the edge in an act that leaves Phasma very displeased with them. Fortunately for them, she is inclined towards mercy, and they get to spend the evening together without being killed and dumped in the Mosel River.
> 
> \---
> 
> Content warning for discussion of consent issues inherent in honey trap type situations. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is debauchery here, debauchery, yay! And we have but a short epilogue left to go!
> 
> This is where the smut lives! Well, more of it! We hope you like it.

Kylo Ren had done some difficult things in the course of his life. He had stuck with his German lessons from middle school and into undergrad. He had taught himself how to play bass. He had read Goethe and Schiller in the original German, and tried at least to understand Kant. He had passed an exam written under the dire stress of a cracked tooth, finished graduate school at MIT and survived hand-to-hand combat training with a CIA operative and an MI-6 agent as his instructors.

But he realized at this very moment that all that paled, really, next to the experience of having to listen to two people fuck through a slightly thin wall. 

He couldn’t grudge Émelie Frehner her infatuation with Rory - Hux played him to sheer perfection - but he could at least wish that he hadn’t had to watch it. Watch it he had, however, as she finished her Bellini, and Rory left half his vodka gimlet untouched and had paid for the drinks before politely walking her to the lobby where the elevators were. He had kissed her chastely on the cheek, a perfect gentleman as the elevator arrived with a soft _ding_ , and had bade her a good night. Frehner had stepped back into the empty elevator with a soft smile, and then reached out for Rory’s wrist, caught him by the sleeve of his Burberry jacket, and dragged him into the elevator with her. 

Ren had watched them kiss as the doors slid shut in front of them, and he had been on the verge of bursting into tears when Phasma had simply stood up abruptly and left a few bills on the table to pay for their coffee. 

“We need to go now, Ren,” she had said, and he stood numbly, watched her pick up the aluminum briefcase at her side, and then followed her to the lobby to wait for their own elevator. 

“Did it have to be tonight?” Ren had asked Phasma in the elevator, on their long ride to the fifth floor where Frehner’s room was located. 

“I don’t think Frehner gave Hux much of a choice,” Phasma had said. “You saw what happened there. He was being gentlemanly so she wouldn’t feel pressured into sex.” 

Ren had taken a deep breath then, steadied himself against a wall. “Yeah - that was ethical of him, I guess?” 

Phasma chuckled weakly. “I wouldn’t want to continue working with him if he had been aggressive about it. Honey trapping is sordid enough without adding consent issues to it.” 

Something about Phasma’s comment made things align in Ren’s head, things she had said earlier today, during their late lunch, and things she had told him even earlier, when Hux had volunteered as bait. _Consent issues._ Ren stopped short and looked up, his own misery abruptly sidelined. “That’s … another way things could have gone wrong, right?” he asked her. 

“I guess I wasn’t being clear enough earlier,” Phasma said thoughtfully, “but yes. Rape is a known risk of trying to seduce someone, and some operatives can get high enough on manipulating their marks that their actions become coercive.” 

“Even with the training.” Ren had not meant his statement as a question, only as an acknowledgement of his previous naiveté. Better to leave this to the professionals, indeed. 

“Even so,” Phasma said, and then they had spoken no more as the elevator doors opened to let them out on the fifth floor. She had led the way once they were out of the elevator, and used a keycard to open the door to the room right beside the one Émelie Frehner was occupying. She had booked it even before their arrival, once they had confirmed Frehner’s travel plans through some digital snooping, and now she was going to use the room as a stakeout post until Rory had done his part in the operation. 

Knowing that by the very nature of his role, Rory couldn’t wear a wire, Phasma had planted a bug in Frehner’s room earlier that afternoon while Frehner had been out meeting one of her mysterious clients. Now Phasma sat at the small desk in their room and opened the aluminum briefcase to reveal a PASIV, its IV lines freshly replaced. She pulled from it a small headset and a novel, and then shut the briefcase again as she put the headset on, and Ren had felt a strange sense of relief that she had not required him to listen in, only to wait. 

But then the gasps and moaning had started, and Ren realized then how thin the walls were, and how much fun Émelie Frehner was having, and he had started to pace restlessly as though the movement would drive conscious thought out of his mind. 

“How is this my life?” Ren had whispered to Phasma during a brief lull in the action, and she had looked up from her copy of _The Quantum Thief,_ an eyebrow raised. 

“How can you read while listening to - that?” Ren gestured at the wall between the rooms, closed his eyes briefly as Frehner cried out, a sharp gasped _“Mon Dieu,”_ and then a long, wordless cry, Rory’s laughter breaking in warm and gentle over her voice. Ren had never experienced such envy mixed with thwarted desire, and to make things worse he wasn’t sure which one of them he was jealous of at the present moment.

“I’ve had to listen to surveillance more times than I want to count,” Phasma said as she put her book down and moved one of her headphones off her right ear. “Probably helps that I’m asexual.” 

“Like… an amoeba?” Ren asked haltingly, unsure of what she had meant.

“Cute. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that before,” Phasma said, deadpan, before she read the look on Ren’s face and raised an eyebrow at his confusion. “No, I’m just not interested in sex at all. For me there’s no emotional component to what I’m hearing.”

“God, I envy you,” Ren groaned as Frehner started moaning again. He could hear Rory on the other side, talking. Saying filthy things to her, no doubt, talking her through another climax. He could almost imagine what Rory was saying, flinched from the thought. “I don’t know what I’d give right now to have no interest in what’s going on next door - to not care.” 

“Oh, I care,” Phasma shrugged, picked up her novel again. “I just don’t want to join in.”

And then Ren had stopped pacing, stopped short as Phasma’s comment registered on his mind, feeling uncomfortably like an entomological specimen pinned and examined under a microscope. 

“Sit down, Ren,” Phasma said without looking up from her novel, “It’s going to take a while and you’ll wear your knees out if you just keep pacing.” 

Ren sat down on one of the beds then, slouched hard and put his face in his hands as Rory laughed again, and then Frehner had _screamed,_ the cry insistent, charged with passion and relief. 

_Fuck you and your untouchable face,_ Ren thought in Rory’s direction, _fuck you for existing in the first place._ He had heard that song in college, and it had somehow stuck to him, stuck to his mind to be remembered only now in his private Hell made up of other people. 

“I’m sorry, Ren,” Phasma said then, apropos of nothing. She had still not looked up from her book.

“You’re sorry?” Ren asked. “Why?” If anyone needed to apologize to him, it would have to be Hux. Hux, who was busy being Rory and who was also quite occupied in giving Émelie Frehner the ride of her life. 

“Sympathy,” Phasma said. She looked up at him then, and he saw the warmth and concern in her otherwise stern expression. “I can tell that this is difficult for you. People have different boundaries. If you want, you can go back downstairs, get another cup of coffee. I’ll call you when Rory’s done and we’re about to start dreamshare.”

“No, no -” Ren said, paused as he heard indistinct snatches of conversation, laughter from the room next door. “Rory can’t possibly take that long. He’ll probably be done by the time I get my coffee and then I’ll have to come straight back up without drinking it.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that if I were you,” Phasma said, solemnly. She tapped her headset with a finger, adjusted it carefully on her head. “This tells me he’s just getting started.”

Ren had looked up then, turned to stare at the wall dividing the rooms as he tried to figure out what was going on despite every instinct telling him it was a bad idea. “He - what do they feed field agents in Vauxhall?” 

Phasma shrugged and turned back to her novel. “It’s called foreplay, Ren, and we do want her to pass out afterwards, you know.”

 _I know what foreplay is,_ Ren wanted to say, but thought better of it. He let himself flop limply onto the bed, stared up at the ceiling as the moaning started up again. “I think _I’m_ going to pass out now,” he said weakly.

“Go ahead,” Phasma said, too-seriously. “I’ll just wake you up when we’re ready to go.” 

_Fuck. My. Life,_ Ren thought bitterly as he grabbed for a pillow, held it over his head to block out what he was currently hearing. He could do this now, he thought, now that he wasn’t hearing it. He was also wrinkling his suit jacket, but he could not bring himself to care anymore. 

And then the thumping started, vibrations from the bed in the next room bumping into the wall, shivering into Ren’s skin and muscle and bone as it reverberated through the headboard of the bed he was lying in, and he bit down on his lip as the visuals returned again like a slide show behind his eyes. _Was this what it was like to be on the other side of me, listening in the night?_ Ren thought, and wondered if this was retribution as guilt had welled cold and slick in his belly. Maybe even revenge, he thought. 

The amount of hate it would take for Hux to want to fuck a woman he didn’t particularly care about, even if she had been one of his lucky exceptions, just to get back at Ren - its intensity took his breath away.

God. If that was true... he had just spent the last two months throwing away any chance he had of reconnecting with Hux at all. 

_De profundis Domine,_ Ren thought, remembering Hux’s beloved Rimbaud, _what a fool I am!_

Ren could see it all too well in his mind, what was happening in the room next door. He had spent so much time looking at Hux that he could also imagine Rory fairly easily. Ren no longer had the strength to resist as his artist’s eye conjured up the expressions on Rory’s face, the way his eyes would slip shut, that long shivering shudder as he savored the breathtaking heat and wetness of Émelie’s sex, how she would wrap her legs around his waist as he started to rock against her. Each visual pushed agonizingly, exquisitely against the inside of his skull, but Ren could not make himself stop. It was horrible, obsessive, intrusive, and all the worse for its charged eroticism.

Ren grasped mentally at his own thoughts, focused his inner eye on the tiny crucifix Rory had worn, the gold imagined glinting warm in the room’s low light as it swung on the chain around his neck. Ren seized onto this visual, imagined every tiny detail of the pendant, the minute wounds of Christ, a crown of thorns fine as a hair moulded onto His tangled hair, little countersunk domes representing nails driven through wrists and feet. It helped calm him a little, helped him think of something other than the increasing pace of Rory’s movements on the other side of that wall, want and need and urgency telegraphing straight into Ren’s nerves, syncopating with the bruised throb of his own heart. 

He let go of the pillow over his head then, drew his knees up and gave himself over to the misery he felt, clutching with trembling fingers at the champagne-colored silk foulard tie fastened like a noose around his neck. His sense of touch felt somehow magnified, and he could almost read the print of the fabric with his fingertips, felt the tiny intersections of shiny and matte threads in its weave. This necktie had sat around Hux’s throat, had snugged up against him in a half-Windsor knot, lain against his chest underneath his waistcoat; this transference would have to be enough, enough to tide him over this desperate time. 

“Please,” Ren heard Émelie Frehner cry, _“Please, oh please,”_ the desperation in her voice increasing with each iteration, and he could tell from the tremors, from what he could hear, that Rory was close, so close to the edge. There had been a gasp, high, sharp, Frehner’s voice, and she had cried out once more, nearly drowning out Rory’s breathed “oh _Christ,_ ” and his loud shout of “ _Jesus,_ ” as he had come. Ren realized then, as the voices faded into silence, that he had been holding his breath, and he exhaled slowly, shuddered, and opened his eyes.

 _I can do this,_ Ren thought as he sat up, brushed his fingers down the front of his borrowed necktie, _I just have to go over there and look him in the face and pretend nothing’s happened at all and go heist this information from Frehner’s head._

Phasma glanced over at him from her seat at the desk, raised an eyebrow. “Are you okay?” she asked him, and he realized that she had already put her book away, taken her headset off too. 

“Yeah,” Ren managed shakily, took another deep breath to steady himself. “Yeah. I can do this.” 

Phasma stood up then, picked up the aluminum briefcase easily, and patted Ren on the shoulder gently as she crossed the room to wait at the door. The gesture surprised him, comforted him a little, and he had stood up, taken off his suit jacket and brushed his trousers off. Ren felt a little of his composure returning with each little gesture. 

Phasma’s phone buzzed once then, a brief text message, and she had opened the hotel room door and put her phone back in her pocket, beckoned to Ren as she stepped out. They exited the room and stood at the next. Phasma rapped once, lightly, at the door, and it had opened to reveal Rory, mostly dressed again, still breathing hard. His hair was wild, tousled even more than it had previously been, and his shirt hung open to reveal a swath of his chest, showing the flush that had crept down his neck from his earlier exertions. He looked tired, thoroughly fucked-out, but his gaze was still sharp and bright, hard, cold and calculating under the endorphin haze. 

He stepped aside from the doorway and let them in, and Ren saw that Frehner was curled up on the right side of the bed. Rory had tucked the sheets and duvet thoughtfully over her, and her dark hair had fanned out shiny, spread like a raven’s wing on the pillow beneath her head. Her lips were still curved into a gentle smile. _At least she had fun,_ Ren thought, unable to summon bitterness or rage. He felt hollow and empty, as though he had cried so hard and for so long that he had simply run out of the wherewithal to feel anything more. 

“That wasn’t strictly lying back and thinking of England,” Phasma teased, her voice soft and low. There had really been little need for this whispering - Ren knew from mission planning that Rory had offered Frehner a glass of water in gentlemanly fashion afterwards, and it had been spiked to keep her comfortably asleep in the weariness that followed the energetic passage of the last hour.

Rory laughed wearily then, retorted, “No, this involved thinking of Uncle Sam instead.”

Ren concentrated on undoing his shirt cuff then. His fingers felt numb, clumsy, distant, as though they had been shot up with novocaine, and it had taken him two tries to unbutton his left sleeve and to roll it up to expose his forearm. That done, he sat down as Phasma put the aluminum briefcase down on the nightstand next to Frehner, unlocked and opened it. 

Rory spotted Phasma’s novel tucked where the documentation and warranty normally went, raised an eyebrow at her wordlessly, and she had grinned and shrugged easily. He then reached into the PASIV’s storage compartment and pulled out a single-use pair of nitrile gloves in a sterile envelope, popped the seal and put them on before he swabbed Frehner’s forearm and hooked her up to the device. He secured the tether around her wrist, and then helped Ren with his line. 

It felt weird, somehow, vaguely strange behind the numbness to have Rory touching him now, like some strange aftershock after an earthquake, and Ren was thankful that he had propped himself up against the side of the bed when he sat down. The procedure was swift, almost painless from repeated practice, and Ren leaned back and closed his eyes when the tether closed around his forearm. He knew that Phasma was next in line for the hookup, and then Rory would be last. Ren registered the creak of the mattress springs, a sensation more felt than heard, and he knew that Rory had laid himself down on the left side of the bed. He opened his eyes to see Phasma sitting beside the nightstand, and nodded at her as she reached up with her hand to depress the Start button on the PASIV. 

Its infusion pump hissed softly then, and Ren felt the friendly familiar drowsiness pulling at his eyes, felt so very heavy as he fell asleep and dreamed, dreamed of nothing in particular -

\---

Ren opened his eyes and looked around, found himself standing on a sidewalk beside a black-painted van with Hux at his side. _No, Rory,_ he thought after a moment, after realizing that the man’s eyes were still a deep hazel green.

Phasma sat in the driver’s side of the van, and she rolled the passenger window down to speak to them. “I’m going to set up and get ready. I’ll start the diversion on your signal.” 

“Of course.” Rory still spoke with his Irish accent. And then he had turned abruptly away from Phasma, walked away from the van, and Ren had followed him through this city very much like Zurich, with a few key differences. 

“Never create a level entirely from memory,” Snoke had warned him once, during a training exercise that had ended with Ren pulling a city’s reflection out of a lake and inverting it upon the original so that both images had overlapped, city and nigh-city alike. They had then simply stepped sideways into a meromictic world picked out in weak filtered sunlight, every surface rippled and distorted with gentle undulations. “Always use pieces from multiple memories, or include something as a tell so that you always know if you’re in a dream. It needs only to be realistic enough to convince a mark that they’re awake in very specific missions, but at all other times rely on the mutability of dreams to aid your deceptions.”

The air had been thicker in the reflection, and he had felt the reversed buoyancy pushing him down in lieu of gravity. His hair had drifted behind him slowly as he had walked, and the strangeness and beauty of the experience had thrilled him, wrapped him in a reverie within his own lucid dreaming. “What happens if I use something straight from memory?” Ren had asked after a few silent minutes of walking, more curious than anything else, but Snoke had been very serious in his reply. 

“That runs the risk of blurring the lines between dreams and reality,” said Snoke, “You have totems, yes, but they are only good as long as they remain uncompromised. It is much better to build so that you will not have to rely on anything that can potentially be sabotaged.”

The building they stood in front of now was not Ren’s finest moment as an architect. It was practically a pastiche of an office building, which he had pulled together from all of the elements of all of the steadfastly boring office buildings he had ever seen. 

The glassed-in entryway, the stone-clad columns, the reception desk (empty) with the vase of slightly dusty fake flowers - Ren cringed internally as they walked, but it was what it had needed to be. Anyone who had ever stepped inside a building of this sort would feel themselves at home, understand the environment, and trust that nothing very bad could ever happen to you in a place so relentlessly corporate.

Rory glanced over the board at the elevators quickly, and reached out for the down button. They had run this level over and over in the lab at Langley and it seemed that nothing untoward had happened when Frehner’s mind had been added to the mix. That would mean that the secure storage level, below the underground parking, marked on the board as “Maintenance”, would be just how they’d left it.

Ren waited at the panel of buttons as Rory scanned the corners of the elevator for any new hidden cameras. “Hah,” he said under his breath, and reached up to the ceiling, pushed up a panel with his fingertips and extracted a tiny plastic nubbin which he crushed under the heel of his loafer. “Take that, little bastard.”

The oath, in the voice still so strangely like Hux, made Ren squirm. He covered his discomfort by turning to the floor buttons again. “Can we go, now?”

“If you like being torn apart by angry projections and then explaining yourself to Phasma, you just go right ahead.” Rory was richly scornful as he crouched on the floor. “But if I were you - _there_ you are, ya little fucker -” He prised a panel off the wall with a screwdriver Ren was totally certain he hadn't had a second ago, and freed a second bug, snapping its button battery out of its housing. “I would wait until you got the go-ahead. Which is now.”

Ren stabbed at the button for B3 as though it had personally offended him, and the elevator dropped in silence as Rory drew his gun. Ren followed his lead, and from either side, they waited tensely for the chime of the opening doors. 

Rather anticlimactically, the hallway was empty, clear from end to end. There was no sound but the ventilation fans humming, no sign that anyone was down here but them.

Rory gestured to Ren to follow, and ran lightly down the corridor. This bit was easy - a maze, traditional, the gray hallways studded with unmarked gray doors, narrowing and looping back upon themselves, designed to slow down any pursuit. Ren had had it memorized since an hour after he’d first built it, and Hux and Phasma knew it by the second time they’d run it with him.

His headset chirped. “I’m in position,” Phasma said softly. “I don’t think I’ve been spotted yet but there's a small crowd collecting outside. You want to be quick about this or I’m going to have to start shooting.”

“Impeccable as always,” Rory purred back at her, real warmth under it that sparked jealousy low in Ren’s belly.

All Ren wanted was that voice, not the edge of scorn, the curled lip - even Rory couldn't stand him. Hux couldn't even _pretend._

It was a good thing they’d both run the maze so many times they could, quite literally, do it blindfolded. Ren had stopped paying attention several turns ago and was almost surprised when Rory slowed and stopped in front of a door just like all the ones they’d passed on the way. 

“Here we are,” Rory said. “Now has she locked you, or did I do a better job than I thought?” He knelt, tried the handle, laughed lightly. “Ah well. Just as well for her she didn't trust me quite that much. And just as well for the United States Government that I wasn't expecting her to.” He drew a handful of lockpicks from his pocket, chose two and slid them into the keyhole. A moment of microadjustments, and then three sharp shoves and the lock clicked. 

“Open, sesame,” Rory said grandly, and stepped back as the door opened.

The room was small and dim and dusty, as though no-one had been there for a very long time. There was a table, and a single chair; a tattered poster of a hot-air balloon on the wall that looked as though it had been put up and forgotten some time in the late 1980s; and in the back corner, hulking and incongruous, a shiny, modern tamper-proof safe. 

“There you are, my pretty.” Rory advanced on the safe, stroked its front panel gently. “The things I'm going to do to you.”

Ren bit his tongue hard enough to taste blood. “Will you stop making love to that thing and just open it?” he hissed. “Please.”

Rory looked up from the safe, eyes narrowed. “What, because your strenuous task of sitting on a table, watching an empty hallway and making sure it stays that way, is wearing you out?”

Their headsets beeped. “Gentlemen,” Phasma said. “I regret to inform you that I'm about to dispel an angry mob. Or possibly aggravate them. Just so you know.”

“Ta,” Rory said. “We’re in the room - we won't be too long once I've had my way with this safe.”

“Good,” said Phasma, and clicked off again. 

Rory looked back to Ren, then, pulled his own headset off his ear and clicked the mic to mute. “Okay. You clearly have something to say to me, so go on and say it before you fucking burst, will you, because I can't work with you looking at me like you’d burn a hole in my skull. What’s your problem, then?”

“What’s _my_ problem?” Ren stared at him. “What’s _your_ problem, can we start there?” He yanked his headset off and dropped it on the table, then pushed himself off the edge and stepped towards Rory. “Can we start with the fact that literally nothing I ever do is good enough for you? I can't go five minutes without you insinuating I'm not pulling my weight. I have done everything I could think of to be good enough. Fucking holier-than-thou Brendan Hux, what did I ever do to you?”

“I don't think you want to do this now,” Rory said, a low warning. 

“No, I do,” Ren said. “No, I really, really do, because I could almost handle it when I thought you couldn't understand human concepts like friendship, or kindness, or love. But then this -” He waved his hands in a gesture that encompassed all of Rory. “Then you come over all Don O’Juan of Donegal, and I get it.” He laughed, bitter and twisted, tears rising in the back of his throat. “I get it now, you actually hate me, you want to fuck everything in the known universe - strangers! inanimate objects! - and you can hardly even stand to _look_ at me.”

“I don’t think,” Rory said, slow and dangerous, “that the man who’s bedded half the District of Columbia in two months ought to be passing judgement on anyone.”

“Fuck you,” Ren spat, “I’m worth it.”

They were almost touching now in this narrow room, motes of dust swirling around them like phantom smoke borne up on heatless thermals of rage, and then Ren reached out for Rory’s collar. He closed his fingers around the fabric where a necktie knot would have been, except this was Rory, and he felt the tiny crucifix, its chain catching on his forefinger. Its tiny arms bit into the palm of his hand as he made a fist and pulled Rory close. 

Their teeth clicked briefly together and then they were kissing, hard, savage enough to hurt, sharp teeth and scratchy stubble on Ren’s skin. Rory’s fingers closed hard around Ren’s shoulders near his neck where the trapezius muscle wrapped like a high collar around the graceful curve of his cervical spine. Those fingers were bruising him, a grounding, grinding pressure and pain as he chose to lose himself in the heat of Rory’s mouth, the sharpness of his teeth, the smell of sex sweat and herbed citrus and vetiver expanding to crowd at his senses. 

_Dear God,_ Ren thought, _oh fuck,_ as Rory’s mouth drifted down to his chin, the soft spot beneath his jaw, wet heat and scratch of stubble. Sudden panic as Rory pushed at him hard, shoved him backwards and down and he managed only to dream up thicker carpet beneath him as he fell, tried to fold with the movement. Nevertheless the landing took the breath out of him, thudded up hard into his diaphragm, and he coughed briefly, gasped against Rory’s mouth as he tried to catch his breath. 

He could feel Rory’s weight on him, hard and heavy and lean, and he ground back up against him as that hot mouth sought his again, kissed the words and the protestations and the air out of his lungs, off his lips. Rory hadn't pulled away, he realized. _Interesting,_ he thought with a tiny, sane corner of his mind, and then the rest of his brain yelled at it to shut up, shut the fuck up before he sabotaged this, too. 

Ren let Rory’s collar and crucifix slip from his grasp as they kissed yet again, and caught the back of his neck, a handful of that glorious hair, red and gold and soft like cornsilk under his touch; reached up with his other hand to trace the sharp lines of Rory’s jawline with a thumb, caress his cheek, rough with stubble and then soft over his cheekbone, pulse throbbing in the temple just under his hairline. 

Rory’s knees were now squeezing sharp and insistent around Ren’s hips, and his hands were still on Ren’s shoulders, and Ren ground experimentally up against him, got a sharp gasp against his mouth that made his skin tingle and his balls tighten. He closed his fingers around Rory’s hair, trying to pull him closer, and then those long clever fingers were letting go of his shoulders, closing around his neck in a light, possessive caress. Rory’s thumbs ran lightly up his neck, lingered over his pulse as they kissed yet again, and Ren savored the flush on his pale skin, his long lashes gleaming over hooded eyes, scraps of silk bright against the violet shadows of his eyelids. 

Rory lifted his head then, opened his eyes, and Ren realized that they were back to his own icy blue. Not Rory, then; _Hux,_ he thought, as they stared at each other, breathing hard. 

“Are we doing this, then?” Hux asked him, the words tumbling in his own crisp accent out of his bruised strawberry mouth. 

“Shut up,” Ren said, “and get back down here.” 

Hux’s hands closed around the leather of his shirt collar, and those wiry wrists strained as he pulled hard, tried to rip it open. The button did not pop - it was simply too well made, and Ren laughed briefly, tiredly as Hux growled softly in frustration. Then he stopped laughing altogether as Hux lifted a hand, held up a small folding knife that he opened with a faint snick. 

The blunt point of the sheepsfoot blade was cold, raised goosebumps against Ren’s belly as Hux slipped it through the placket front, edge-out, and swiped effortlessly upwards, and Ren arched his back, arched up to help him as the fabric parted with barely a whisper. And then the knife was off his skin as Hux leaned into him again, kissed him on the chin and cheek and brow. He tugged the carcass of Ren’s shirt down off his shoulders and let his mouth linger on his neck. Ren tried to work his arms free of the sleeves, felt them catch at his elbows, and he writhed, hung up on his own cuffs, entirely at Hux’s mercy as those teeth nipped hard enough to leave a mark on the juncture of his shoulder and neck. 

Hux laughed then, a real laugh, as he undid Ren’s belt buckle. The knife came back out, and Ren couldn’t help flinching when the back of the blade brushed against the skin of his lower belly. 

“Do you mind this?” Hux asked him, pausing briefly to stroke the right side of Ren’s face with a free hand. “It’s... quicker. We can’t have long.”

Ren closed his eyes, realized he felt very little fear, laughed a little too. “No. It’s just cold,” he said. 

Hux nodded, shifted his weight and climbed off his hips to run the edge of the blade up one of Ren’s trouser legs, then the other, swiped briefly at his boxer-briefs to reveal the skin of his left hip, the curve of his iliac crest, and he had arched his back again as the knife slipped below the waistband on his right, laid him bare with another soft whisper of parting fabric. Then Hux closed the knife slowly, carefully, almost with ceremony, and he let it drop soundlessly onto the plush carpet that Ren was lying on. 

Ren opened his eyes and lay back, content to be ravished this time as Hux pulled his shredded clothes away to expose his lower body, right hand briefly over the sharp point of his hip, fingers splayed over his ass in silent appreciation before they closed around the shaft of his cock. Ren had gasped then, shuddered and rocked upwards into Hux’s grip, quick merciless strokes as he bent his head again to his neck, leaving a fast-cooling trail of kisses down his chest. Hux nipped lightly at Ren’s nipples, and the sensation was breathtaking, dizzying. Ren wanted so much to lift his hands, to guide Hux’s ministrations, but he was still trapped by the remnants of his shirt. He lay helpless as Hux pulled away from him, unbuttoned his shirt quickly with trembling hands, unbuckled his belt and tugged his trousers and silk boxers off his own skinny hips. 

Hux reached into a pocket then, pulled out a small bottle of lubricant, and Ren had shivered in anticipation then as he had run slippery fingers up the shaft of his cock, fingertips lingering on the head. Hux’s fingers were so pale against the heated skin of his cock, flesh translucently dusky from the blood suffusing it, and then Ren had groaned, hoarse and eager as Hux slipped two greased fingers into him, spread him quickly, roughly. 

“Leave me raw,” Ren whispered as Hux took hold of his hips, tilting him up, and then he was pushing up and into Ren, that sweet perfect burn of that stretch, of Hux fitting in him like they had been made for each other. He wrapped his legs around Hux’s narrow waist and arched his back, and Hux had shuddered briefly, and then started to fuck him hard, mercilessly. He kept a punishing pace, and Ren had moaned his assent as Hux found his prostate again and again with each relentless thrust. It was fast and desperate and messy, both of them ravenous with months of pent-up want, both of them believing they’d wake up at any second, because it just couldn’t be real after all their ache and distance that they were here, now, doing this.

Ren felt his climax bearing down on him, lurking on the narrowing edges of his consciousness as Hux fucked him open and raw as he had requested. He was shaking, his teeth chattering with each eager thrust as he felt Hux’s back tense up beneath his calves, and he knew that Hux was getting close too. He did not care, could not care to slow down - so what if this could end unsatisfyingly? They could always try again, later - that there _could_ be a later was all that Ren wanted as he lay burning heatlessly, a man of fire under Hux’s hungry touch. _My funeral pyre,_ Ren managed to think, a fragment he held on to in that sweet unbearable bliss. 

“Ren,” Hux breathed, “Oh, _oh,_ ” his breath hot against Ren’s neck and ear, and then Ren had tightened his legs around Hux’s waist, drawn him helplessly in as he started to come in a roar of pleasure, sensory overload running up the base of his spine to pool in his balls, in his prostate, zinging up his cock and up his spine, the base of his skull. Sweet fire licked up his nerves, left him a calcined lump of gold, oversensitive and overwhelmed as Hux had thrust again into him, and then again, hard as he too came with a long, trembling shudder. Hux bit down on Ren’s shoulder, keened high-pitched into his skin as he spent, and the pain was sharp and clean, cold against the haze of his endorphin rush. 

Ren propped himself up on his elbows slowly as Hux pulled away from him, the both of them wordless, silent except for the sound of their own breathing. Hux kissed him once more on the forehead, stroked at his hair briefly as he rose, and then extended a hand out to him once he was standing again, his clothes impossibly sliding back to their previous state. Ren frowned a little in concentration, and then he was dressed again, immaculate on the outside even as he felt Hux’s spunk running wet out of his tender ass, down the back of his thigh to soak into his underwear. 

Hux looked dazed, as he turned back to the safe and his bag of tools. “I’ve got to get this open,” he said, to no-one in particular, Rory’s accent slipping back in around the corners as he remembered where they were and what they were supposed to be doing.

“Of course,” Ren said, “and I’ll… I’ll keep guarding, I guess.” He picked his headset up off the table then, turned it in his hands to put it on, and then stopped short.

The mic light was still on. 

Which meant that Phasma had probably heard them. 

Well. Shit. 

Ren pondered briefly whether to put his headset back on as Hux knelt beside the safe again, and decided to in the interests of the mission. Which he had just interrupted for a personal booty call. Which he had accidentally broadcast to his boss, Phasma. Whose dreams they were in. Ren had a well-developed sense of oncoming doom inherited from his father, and his instincts had bred true as he thought, _I have a bad feeling about this._

Hux, as yet blissfully unaware of the tumbling anvil of fate, drilled carefully through the safe, specifically through points that would not break the glass relocker plate that would have locked the bolts in place if it had shattered. The drill he was using had been equipped with a specialized bit as the metal of the safe had been impregnated with tungsten chips that would have simply chewed up a regular bit in any attempt to drill an observation hole.

Ren watched him as he fed a flexible fiber-optic scope through the hole he had drilled in the top of the safe, his fingers pushing the scope through smoothly, incrementally until he had lined it up with the innards of the combination lock, and then he had squinted down through it as his right hand spun the dial lightly, carefully. His movements were familiar, casual almost under the precision required for safecracking, and Ren wondered what other skills he had learned in his mysterious, classified past. 

Hux made a small, pleased noise, then, and the safe door swung open, revealing a disappointingly plain manila folder that Hux pulled out and opened. In it were sheets of paper detailed with client lists, accounts, details. Émelie Frehner had reflexively placed this confidential information in the secure safe as she had fallen into Phasma’s dream and filled it with her thoughts and memories and projections. 

The information would have taken a small team and an extensive black-bag job to acquire in the waking world, and it would not all have been kept neatly in one spot like this. Hux speed-read through half of the sheets and handed the other half to Ren to memorize. Ren flipped quickly through his pages, tagged the information and visualized it in the library in his head, indexed it under F for Frehner in one of the private collections where he kept work-related information. 

He handed his pages over to Hux when he had finished them, received Hux’s pages in return, and the both of them finished memorizing the information they had come to Luxembourg for - Émelie Frehner’s complete client list, including a few the Agency had not known of, financial details of those wealthy and powerful individuals, tax havens, secret bank accounts in Liechtenstein and Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, who and what that information was buying, financing, funding. 

Ren saw Hux reach up to his headset then and turn on the mic, felt a sudden terrifying spike of panic as the mic light lit up. “We’ve got the payload, Phasma,” he said calmly, Rory’s lilt wrapped around the words. 

“Took your own sweet time, didn’t you?” Phasma said, her tone acid, and Ren braced internally for the well-deserved lecture that was going to follow shortly.

“We -” Hux started to say, confused, and then she cut him off. 

“Don’t even start with me, either of you,” she said. “One of those mics was live, and I heard _everything._ By the way, that counts as one of the most unprofessional things I have had the ill fortune to witness in my career to date.” Ren glanced at Hux then in mutual shame and embarrassment, watched him go dead white as Phasma took a breath. 

“Hux,” she continued, “you scream like a Justin Bieber fan, and you should be as ashamed. And Ren? I’m glad you like it raw, because you are going to be even rawer when we wake up and I get done with you.” She paused her tirade then, and there was a report from her rifle, two before she spoke again. “You had better hurry up shooting yourselves so I can see if a bullet to the head will actually erase some of what I heard from my goddamned memory, thank you _very_ much.”

“I -” Hux tried to say again, and then Phasma clicked her mic off with a small burst of static, and he pulled his headset off and stared at it in his hands for a long moment before he turned it off as well. He looked completely lost, exhausted and terribly vulnerable, and Ren turned his headset off too, reached out and took him by the shoulders, reeled him into a long, crushing hug. 

“Hey,” Ren murmured as soothingly as he could manage, “you’re okay,” and Hux’s arms had closed tight around his waist as they kissed again, long and slow.

Ren pushed Hux’s left arm gently away, drew his SIG, and Hux did not flinch as he placed the muzzle tenderly against his temple. He leaned into Ren’s shoulder wearily, and then Ren pulled the trigger, turned the smoking barrel on himself as Hux sagged slowly to the floor, deadweight sliding out of his grip -

\---

Awake. Waking abruptly in Émelie Frehner’s room, the place almost unrecognizable after what had just happened in the dream. Fewer than ten minutes had passed - something over an hour in the dream. Hux was sitting up in Frehner’s bed, his facial expression rather more his usual wariness despite the contacts still masking the blue of his eyes, and he removed his IV cannula and tether without another word, fed the line slowly back into the PASIV. Phasma stood slowly up, her mouth a hard narrow line as she disconnected Frehner and then herself, and then knelt down beside Ren to help him with his IV line. She did not speak, and Ren could sense the anger in her, fulminating, kept tamped down with iron discipline, and he did not tempt fate by trying to say anything else.

The last thing Hux did was to retrieve his jacket as Phasma removed the bug she had placed earlier in the day, and they filed out of her room silently, one by one. Phasma did not say anything else as they left Frehner’s hotel separately and took different routes back to their own lodgings, and the walk gave Ren ample time to remember his father’s warning over the phone: _“You haven’t seen her at her scariest yet. Pray you don’t.”_

Ren wished quite hard then that he had actually believed in a god or higher being that could grant him some kind of protection or intervention against Phasma’s admittedly perfectly reasonable wrath. 

And then, walking, he thought of Hux, of that hot mouth and that desperate touch, the softness of his hair and that cold kiss of the knife, and he could not maintain his own dread in the heat of those memories. _She can kill me now, she’d be justified,_ Ren thought, _and I think I’d still die with a grin on my face._ Then he thought again of the chill in her gaze when she had advanced upon him, training knife in hand, and tried to set his face in some semblance of seriousness as he walked up the steps into the lobby of his hotel, took the elevator up to his room, and waited for Hux and Phasma to return.

Ren’s phone buzzed ten minutes later, and he checked it with a vague sense of impending doom, only to find that it was Hux who had messaged him. 

_Phasma is back,_ it read, _meet in my room. Hope you have a current will._

Ren left his room, and he knocked on Hux’s room door once, waited to be let in. Hux was alone, still dressed as Rory as he opened the door to let Ren in. 

“Phasma?” Ren asked as the door shut behind him, watched as Hux sat down wearily, heavily on the edge of his bed. 

“She needed to take care of something,” he said, and Ren could see a faint tremor in his hands. 

“Like getting ready to murder us and then toss our bodies in the Mosel River, right?” Ren asked as he sat down next to Hux, close enough for their shoulders to touch, and was gratified when Hux leaned into the contact. 

“To be absolutely honest,” Hux said as he rubbed at his stubbly face with both hands, “I had considered vanishing on the way back, but I don’t think even I can cover my tracks well enough to lose her.” Hux paused, sighed. “And I can’t just leave you here to face her alone.”

 _“She’s a good hand in the field,”_ Ren’s father had said, and he realized that Han had not been exaggerating if someone like Hux was afraid of her. “Do you think she’s going to shoot us, or stab us, or stab us then shoot us?” Ren asked Hux, but there had been no time to answer as a hard knock sounded on the room door. 

Hux crossed himself exaggeratedly as Ren stood up and opened the door, and there Phasma stood, seemingly unarmed for the moment. She wasn’t holding a bag, either, which reassured him that she probably wasn’t carrying the requisite tarpaulins to wrap his exsanguinated corpse in for proper disposal. Her expression was calm - too calm, and Ren felt his insides knot up in a growing dread as he stepped back to let her in and sat back down next to Hux, not touching him this time. 

Phasma crossed the room and picked up the television remote control, picked a random channel for background noise, and then started to speak, her voice low and controlled under the rage. 

“You two,” she started, shook her head and tried again. “I am so disappointed in you both. Ren, I had thought that the last two months’ training would have at least impressed upon you the seriousness of the things we do out in the field. And Hux. You, with your stellar work record and your vaunted experience. You, I’m even more disappointed in because you’re supposed to know better.”

Ren tried to look appropriately contrite, but Hux had taken his hand then, and it had been an effort not to grin despite the ear-blistering he was receiving in that moment. 

“This is not a damned James Bond movie. This is not even an episode of _24._ I don’t care that you two had your little indiscretion at all, but the timing could not have been worse. Do you think I was having fun in that sniper perch while you two decided to get personal business done on work time? Do you think I needed that while I was trying to actually concentrate on distracting the projections so they didn’t just barge in and tear you to pieces while you were supposed to have cracked that safe and memorized that information? And don’t try to tell me that was a dream, it wasn’t real, because you two both know that getting shot in a dream hurts and distresses as much as it does while awake. Sure, your sordid little fuck may have only taken a few seconds -” and Hux had looked vaguely offended at the implications then, “- but that was not time I needed to waste in a mission where, if the sedation had failed, Frehner might have woken up and found us there trying to break into her subconscious mind.” 

Hux and Ren sat silent, holding hands still as Phasma’s lecture had sunk in, and then Hux cleared his throat. “You’re right, Phasma. That was terribly foolish and irresponsible of me, and I accept your reprimand as well as any other consequences that might follow.”

“Oh no, you don’t get to say sorry yet, Hux,” Phasma told him. “I am not done. Did you actually consider that you two were having your little bit of debauchery in my mind? Have either of you actually heard about the concept of personal boundaries?” She glared at Ren, and he felt his heart race. “And you, Kylo Ren. I tried so hard to be kind to you, because you clearly couldn’t handle listening to him have sex with Frehner, even with a wall between you. And then you turn around and do this to me, not even just throwing that kindness back in my face, but - you think you were uncomfortable? You have no concept of how much worse it is when it’s in your own _head._ My dreams are not ever an appropriate place for you to be exhibitionists in. Do. You. Understand?” 

“I am so sorry,” Hux said as he rubbed at his crimson face with his right hand, barely even able to look at Phasma. “I really am. I don’t know how I can possibly make this right.” 

“Ren?” she asked, and Ren felt all of a sudden minuscule, tiny under her cold, hard stare. 

“I didn’t say anything because I don’t know if there is anything I can say that can make up for how fucked-up that was. I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it.

Phasma let out a long, slow sigh, and then she leaned back against the desk she had been standing in front of. “To be honest, the only thing that is keeping me from writing home to Langley right now is that I think this may actually have saved me from having to fire one or both of you due to your ridiculous bullshit these last two months. Ren, you’re a terrific architect, and a colossal asshole with absolutely no sense of reasonable limits of behavior. Hux, you’re one of the finest agents I have ever worked with, and you are also completely incapable of acknowledging that you or anyone else have real human feelings you might be treading on. I like both of you a great deal - or I _did_ \- but it was not, and never has been, my job to teach you how to act like mature adults, and after all your carrying on, both of you, I was fully certain this team was dead in the water before we’d even properly begun.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Now, given the fact that you’re currently holding hands and not trying to kill each other, I think maybe there’s the tiniest chance I haven’t been wasting my time on you. So you can start by spending the rest of tonight talking or fucking your way through whatever you need to resolve matters between you, and hell, take tomorrow morning as well. Just get yourselves sorted out, and for fuck’s sake, never, ever, put me in the middle of it again. And then maybe we’ll discuss an alteration of the chore schedule when we get back to D.C., because I’m pretty sure at the very least I should never have to wash any of your dishes, ever again. Do you two hear me?” 

“Yes,” they said in staggered unison, and then she had pushed herself off the desk and turned the television off, padded towards the door. “Don’t… bother me the rest of tonight, okay?” she asked as she reached for the doorknob. “I’m going to go take a hot shower and try to feel less dirty.” 

“I’m sorry,” Ren told her, “again,” and she had sighed, and shut the door behind her. 

“Well,” Hux said, with a false and brittle brightness, “that went better than I had ever expected it to go.” He had started to shake again, his blush fading into unhealthy pallor, and Ren let go of his hand and pulled him into a slow hug, carded his fingers through that soft hair. 

“Yeah, we’re still breathing, which is probably more than we deserve,” Ren sighed as Hux leaned into him for a brief moment. 

“God. I’ve got to get out of all this. Help me, will you?” Hux asked as he pulled away, started to shrug Rory’s jacket off his shoulders, and Ren stood up to help him with the sleeves, and hung the jacket up in the hotel room closet as Hux unbuttoned his shirt and squirmed out of his trousers. This was not an erotic disrobing - rather something that made Ren think of his father stripping wallpaper off a wall or a crane plucking feathers off its own wings, a controlled, careful kind of self-annihilation as Hux tried to disentangle himself from Rory’s identity. 

They did not speak as Hux stepped, naked except for his contact lenses and the crucifix around his neck, into the bathroom. It was a matter of moments for Hux to take out the lenses and let the crucifix and its chain pool into their little niche in his dressing case, and a few more to brush his teeth quickly, and then Ren had disrobed himself and joined Hux in the shower. 

Hot water hissed around them, and Hux had leaned wearily against the shower wall as he washed Émelie Frehner off his skin, tried to scrub Rory off as well in hard swipes of his washcloth until Ren had taken it from his hand. “Shhhh,” Ren told him, though he still hadn’t spoken, and pulled him close, and then he had leaned into Ren’s shoulder while Ren rubbed gentle circles onto the pale skin of his back, temporarily effacing the long desperate scratches that Frehner had left there. Ren ran his fingers through Hux’s wet hair, pushed it away from his face in a manner closer to how he preferred it, and he sensed then how much it had cost him to become Rory and to maintain that identity against the needs of his authentic self. 

Hux cut off the water then, dried himself with one of the large fluffy towels before he stepped out of the shower and let Ren finish drying his hair. He took the razor, the cake of soap and the boar bristle brush out of his dressing case, one by one, with slow ceremony. Ren hung the towel up and watched him as he rubbed shaving oil into his face, saw how his hands shook as he worked a lather up on the little tin of soap and brushed it on. 

“Maybe this isn’t the best idea?” Ren said, as Hux picked up his razor, opened it with trembling hands, almost dropped it into the sink. Ren had never shaved with a straight razor, was personally terrified of the consequences of slippage or hand tremors, and Hux’s hands were presently far from the steadiness required to shave without further incident.

“No. I need to do this,” Hux said grimly, and then Ren stepped up and took his shoulders gently, rubbed at the tension in his neck and back until the tremors stilled enough for him to shave without accidentally slitting his throat in the attempt. 

“It’s okay, you’re okay,” Ren whispered into his hair, kissed the back of his head as he steadied himself with a deep breath, and then Hux tipped his chin up and pared slowly, carefully away at the stubble veiling the strong lines of his jaw. It was like Hux was sculpting himself back into being, Ren thought, chiselling away what was not truly him, like how Michelangelo freed his exquisite sculptures from raw blocks of marble. 

Each pass stripped a little more of Rory Gallagher away, bringing Bren Hux back to the fore, and he looked almost wholly himself once he had finished a second pass with the razor and cleaned the lather off the brush and the blade. “Thank you,” Hux whispered, meeting Ren’s eyes in the mirror, and Ren had only responded with another kiss to the back of his head. 

“I’m sorry I was such an immature asshole,” Ren murmured as Hux washed the last of the lather off his face. “Can we just agree that I never should have said any of what I said to you? Because that was awful, and you didn’t deserve it. I’m sorry.”

“I’m -” Hux started to say, and then sighed, the sound hard and painful. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be Rory for longer. I know you wanted him. I just needed to - I couldn’t -” He gave up the sentence, and looked miserably at Ren in the mirror.

Ren’s jaw dropped open briefly, and then he shut his mouth as he caught sight of his reflection and realized how foolish he looked like that.

“How can someone as smart as you,” he asked, turning Hux away from the mirror to look at him, to look into those pale blue eyes, “be so stupid? It’s not Rory. It was never Rory. It’s always been you.”

“Oh,” Hux breathed softly, shakily, and Ren felt an intense stab of pity and longing at the sudden hope in his face. 

“I don’t need you to be that Irish git - not ever again if you don’t want to. I need you to be the man who taught me how to fit in in a world I didn’t understand. I need you to be the man who taught me how to stay alive. I need you to be the man I can read Rimbaud with, and hear you read it back in the original, and tell me how it’s better. I need you to be the man who never shot me in reality, not even once, not even when I fucking deserved it.” That got the tiniest of half-smiles out of Hux, but not the one Ren wanted. “I just need you,” he said gently, “only you, because -” Ren’s voice failed him then, and he stopped briefly, gathered himself. “I love you. I’ve loved you since the first day I met you, Hux. Please, just… just let me.”

“I -” Hux faltered, as though he couldn’t quite catch his breath, “oh, I have been a bloody idiot.” 

And then he wrapped his arms around Ren’s waist, and pressed his damp face into the skin of Ren’s shoulder, and they stood holding each other, listening to their heartbeats and the slow steady drip of water from the shower, trickling down the drain in tiny rivulets. 

Hux was still shaking when they stepped out of the bathroom, and Ren wrapped him in one of the plush hotel robes, helped him with the tie around his waist and then walked him to bed. He then opened the minibar, plucked out a tiny bottle of gin. “I’ll cover that if you want,” he said, but Hux waved the offer away as he leaned back against the headboard, eyes half-closed and shadowed with dark purple. 

“Get me some Scotch,” Hux asked, and they had sat in bed together, sipping liquor straight from the tiny bottles as their hair dried. Hux’s tremors had faded somewhat in intensity, but they were still there, present in tiny twitches and shivers that shook the liquor in the miniature bottle every time they manifested.

“I thought it seemed so easy, but it isn’t, is it?” Ren asked, thinking of Rory, of Hux’s transformation. 

“Some times are easier than others,” Hux murmured numbly as the liquor started to take effect. “This one wasn’t too bad.” 

“Mhm.” _This one wasn’t too bad,_ and it had left Hux trembling like a leaf in the wind. Ren sensed a great amount of old pain behind that reticence, chose not to probe further for fear of what truly bad really was. It didn’t seem like a good idea to make Hux think of something traumatic after an experience like this, and he remained silent for the next few minutes. 

Ren finished his gin and left the bottle on the nightstand, and then shifted in bed to tuck his arm over Hux’s shoulder. Instinctively Hux leaned back into the embrace, and Ren crawled out of the sheets to settle himself behind him, back pressed against the headboard as he sang an Einstürzende Neubauten song he had loved for a long time. 

_“Ich traum' ich treff' dich ganz tief unten_  
_die tiefste Punkt der Erde, Mariannergraben, Meeresgrund._  
_Zwischen Nanga Parbat, K2 und Everest,_  
_das Dach der Welt dort geb' ich dir ein Fest.”_

Ren translated the lyrics mentally as he sang. 

_“I dream I’ll meet you deep beneath the surface,_  
_in the bottom of the Marianas’ deepest trench._  
_Twixt the peaks of Nanga Parbat, K2 and Everest,_  
_on the world’s ceiling you’ll be my honored guest.”_

Hux began to relax then, left his half-empty whisky on the nightstand too, and he closed his eyes as Ren sang to him, ran fingers through his hair. Ren could feel the tension slowly bleeding out of Hux’s body, out of his muscles, which loosened slightly as he leaned further back into Ren’s chest. Ren kept singing as Hux sagged against him, glad at least that the tremors had slowed to a stop, purred softly in Hux’s ear as he came to the final chorus repeat. 

_“Denn du träumst mich, ich dich_  
_ich träum' dich, du mich_  
_Wir träumen uns beide wach.”_

“What did that mean?” Hux murmured drowsily as Ren’s voice tapered off into silence, and Ren shifted then, got up to pull the sheets over Hux as he whispered, _“You dream me and I, you/ I dream of you and you of me/ We dream each other awake.”_

Ren sat up for a few minutes more, stroking Hux’s soft hair lightly, and then yawned hard enough to squeeze tears out of his eyes. He tucked himself into bed beside Hux, rolled over and draped his left arm over Hux’s chest. Hux murmured briefly in his drowsiness, something faint and unintelligible, and then he had leaned into Ren’s chest and they fell asleep like that, pressed close together while the summer night went on heedlessly without them. Hux was warm and still, his breathing deep and even, and Ren could only feel comforted by his presence.

\---

Ren woke the next morning, suddenly aware that he was alone in bed. He reached across the sheets with his left hand, found the spot next to him empty, and then rolled over onto his back in a careless sprawl.

The sun shone warmly through the sheer curtains, illuminating Hux, who sat in the armchair by the window with a cup of tea in his hand. He had been looking out through the curtains, his eyelashes veiling those pale eyes, and the sun had licked over his fair skin, dipping him in gold. His hair, brighter without the usual pomade, blazed in the early morning light like a living flame. 

“I’m sorry,” Hux said as he saw Ren stir, “I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

Posed still like that he looked like an altar candle topped with its tongue of fire, someone prayed for and granted in an astonishing, impossible miracle of grace. The robe had started to creep off his right shoulder, revealing his neck and the slope of his shoulder, and Ren thought again to Sargent’s portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the famous Portrait of Madame X. There were so many concordances between Hux, the living person, and the painting itself - how Gautreau had affected her pallor through paint and powder, her living flesh showing only at her fingertips and her ear. Critics had once been scandalized by the piece as Sargent had painted the strap of her gown sliding off her right shoulder. 

“One more struggle,” a critic had written in _Le Figaro,_ “and the lady will be free”. Ren had learned that the straps had been ornamental - that Gautreau’s gown had been stiffened with whalebone and the critic had been greatly mistaken in the chances of a wardrobe malfunction. In that painting he found a companion to Hux’s careful artifice, the iron construction of his style, and glimpsed also the humanity beneath. They had both been incredibly appealing to the eye, but that image had been constructed as armor, not to pander. Besides, Gautreau’s henna-dyed hair and artificial pallor were bettered by Hux’s own natural coloration, watercolor skin against a world of oil paintings. Ren could not take his eyes from the sliver of skin revealed by the robe’s open collar, wished he had a brush-point pen so he could draw Hux as the masterpiece he already was.

“What are you looking at?” Hux asked, and Ren realized that he had been staring. 

He propped himself up on his elbows. “You’re beautiful,” he said. 

Hux averted his gaze then, the faintest hint of a blush showing at the edges of his ears, creeping up his neck as he put the teacup down on the table. “Thank you,” he said at last, and Ren could only smile at his shyness. 

Ren thought of something interesting then, and he felt his own smile widen into something more threatening, enticing. “You know,” he said, “if you’re having trouble sleeping, I do know a surefire remedy.”

Hux caught Ren’s gaze, those pale blue eyes touched with gold from the sun, and he smiled slowly, easily. “Do tell.” 

Ren shrugged, kicked his way free of the sheets and duvet. “This is more of a show than a tell,” he said as he sat up and leaned against the headboard. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to come over here.” 

“Am I?” Hux’s mouth curved crookedly, and Ren watched him undo the knotted tie of his robe with great interest. 

“Well, I could fuck you over the back of that chair,” Ren mused thoughtfully, “for the whole city to see. But this bed’s really nice.” 

“And so large,” Hux agreed as he stepped out of his chair, let the robe fall to the floor behind him. “It does seem a shame to waste it.” 

“You really missed out, before,” Ren whispered in Hux’s ear as he climbed naked into bed, “in the dream.” 

“Really,” Hux whispered against the side of Ren’s neck, as he ran a hand through his hair. 

“Yes - seeing as I had my hands kind of pinned behind me.” Ren reached up then, traced the line of Hux’s jaw with a thumb, let his fingers linger on his neck. 

Hux closed his eyes and let Ren caress him, for a few moments. “What was I missing out on, then?” he whispered when Ren let his hand slip back down on top of the sheets. “Show me.”

Ren rolled Hux gently onto his back then, climbed up onto his knees before he dipped his head to Hux’s neck, nipping gently at his jawline, his lower lip, the soft spot under his jaw. “I’ve wanted to do this to you for so long,” Ren murmured as he reached down with his right hand to find Hux’s stiffening cock, wrapped his fingers around it. 

“Then you had best stop talking and do it,” Hux hissed softly, and he bit down on his lip as Ren gave him a gentle tug, arched his back into Ren’s slow, frustrating strokes. 

“Not so fast,” Ren whispered, and then Hux was pulling hard at his hair, guiding his face upwards for another hot, eager kiss. 

“Use that smart mouth,” Hux whispered as they parted for breath, “or I’ll find a good use for it.” Ren had laughed at that, only squeezed down on Hux’s cock a little harder with each stroke, and Hux had thrust his hips up against the friction. He kissed his way down Hux’s chest, lingering over his nipples, nibbling gently on the tender nubs of flesh with his teeth. Hux lay passive, debauched, clutching only at the sheets beneath him as Ren had quickened the pace of his ministrations, his mouth moving slowly ever downward. Ren left kisses down Hux’s sternum, on the tender spot underneath his ribcage where the diaphragm was, down along the linea alba and his hard belly before he traced a wet path along Hux’s iliac crest. Ren bit gently on the sharp point of his hip, and then a little harder, just enough to leave a mark, and Hux had whimpered softly in response. 

The sound had made Ren’s balls tighten in a sweet ache, and he let go of Hux’s cock then and grasped his hips, licked at his lips before he took Hux into his mouth, all salty skin and sharp sweat, the wiry curl of his pubic hair tickling lightly against Ren’s face as he let Hux thrust up into his mouth.

“Mm,” he grunted as Hux let out a brief moan. It had always delighted him to reduce his partners to incoherence, but there was something particularly delicious about taking Hux, with all his discipline and control, and stripping him down to the very barest core of pleasure and desire. Ren sucked softly on Hux’s cock, let his tongue explore the soft texture of his clean foreskin, and Hux had thrust up against Ren’s mouth with the prettiest groan of frustrated need. 

“Ren,” he had gasped again, and then Ren took a moment to take a deep breath and stifle his gag reflex as he pulled his head back, and then let go of Hux’s hipbones. Hux reached down for his head then, strong fingers tangling sharp in Ren’s hair as he bucked upwards, and Ren let Hux fuck his throat then, closing his eyes against the smell and taste and touch of him, that desperation in each shuddering thrust. Ren had never been trained in the arts of seduction by any kind of governmental agency, but he had learned this trick in college and enjoyed surprising his partners with it, and Hux’s gasps of delight filled his ears as soft hair tickled at his eyelids. 

Ren took hold of Hux’s narrow hips again, running his thumbs lightly over the bony crests of his hips as Hux continued to fuck his mouth, each thrust fast and hard, the ridge of Hux’s frenulum and raphe rough against his tongue. Ren could feel the urgency in Hux’s movements building to a fever pitch, and then there it was, that last eager shudder as Hux came with a long, drawn-out gasp. 

“Oh, Kylo,” Hux gasped, as Ren let him go, “bless you and your smart mouth.” 

“It’s Kylo now, huh?” Ren laughed as he rolled off Hux after they had both caught their breath. 

Hux propped himself up in bed, looked at Ren for a long, serious moment. “It should have been Kylo a long time ago,” he said. 

“Brendan,” Ren whispered, “Bren,” and then Hux’s mouth was hot against his, slick velvety tongue against his lips before he returned the kiss, and he was lying back, pinned gently by Hux’s weight and those strong hands on his shoulders. Ren was by that time too turned-on for patience, and he had growled against Hux’s mouth and reached up to take hold of his copper-gold hair, fine strands tangling in his fingers as he pulled hard and urged him downwards. 

“So impatient,” Hux laughed, hissed a little when Ren tugged again, and then he let go of Ren’s shoulders and grasped Ren’s wrists, squeezed hard enough for his grip to hurt a little. “Don’t you want me to do it properly?”

“Properly?” Ren laughed as he let go of Hux’s hair. “Don’t tell me I’m going to have to hold a teacup or something, while you suck my cock?” 

“Not exactly,” Hux said, and the lascivious gleam in his eyes had rendered Ren silent, taken his breath away as he lay back and waited to see what Hux considered proper in this situation. “Roll over, love,” Hux breathed, and Ren shivered at the tone of his voice, three words charged with an electric kind of tension and excitement. 

He rolled over slowly, saw Hux lick his lips wetly, and shuddered in anticipation as he felt those strong fingers close around his hips, buried his face in his pillow. “Oh,” he breathed, moaned it as Hux kissed him gently on the small of the back, wet lips leaving a fast-cooling trail down his tailbone. Ren hissed sharp and sudden as he felt Hux’s tongue teasing gently against his asshole, licking down his perineum and up again, the touch light, slightly ticklish against thin, sensitive skin. 

Nobody had ever done this to Ren before, and he grasped at the pillow and moaned in surprise and delight, cried out aloud at the sensation of Hux’s tongue pushing gently at the tight ring of his anus, probing hot, wet and velvety as he worked. Hot breath tingled on his skin, on the cleft of his ass, and he realized then that Hux could probably bring him off this way, hands-free. 

Ren could feel his nerves thrumming, his teeth buzzing in his skull from the roar of his pulse in his ears, and then he whimpered as Hux stopped and pulled away to roll him over in bed. He lay back against the mattress and tried to catch his breath as Hux sucked slowly and deliberately at his middle and index fingers, leaving them slick with spit. 

“Is that - oh -” Ren breathed as Hux slid his wet fingers up his asshole, “the proper way to use your mouth?” 

“Only in certain situations,” Hux murmured, his voice low, menacing almost with delicate control and anticipation, “highly improper in others.” He was so close, his breath frustratingly hot against Ren’s dripping cock, cooling fast in a delightful frisson of sensation. 

Ren wanted to say something clever then, could not come up with the coherent thought to do so, and then he arched his back and shouted as Hux found his prostate, nudged it gently. Hux moved his fingertips in slow maddening circles as Ren writhed around him, reached behind him to grasp the headboard in a white-knuckled grip. 

“So noisy,” Hux purred, and then he bent his head to Ren’s cock, took the head in that wicked mouth, and Ren could only close his eyes and groan at the wet heat, and the careful, very light scratch of Hux’s teeth on the shaft of his cock. It was impossible, untenable to be teased so cruelly with those callused fingertips gently massaging his prostate, and that liquid heat of Hux’s mouth encompassing his cock, that clever tongue flicking at his sensitive coronal ridge. 

Ren could not think, could not do anything except give himself wholly over to Hux’s cruel ministrations, torn between reflexively bucking upwards against that mouth or pushing himself further down on those fingers. Ren was being played out, fish on the end of a long line, hart fleeing the hounds, losing himself but always called back to the limits of his own flesh and blood. Hux was taking him to pieces slowly, deliberately as he immolated sweetly, his nerves and skin smoldering and tingling with arousal and excitement and always that slightly-insufficient fulfilment. 

“Please, Bren,” Ren whispered as Hux paused for breath, shuddered as he heard the whine in his own voice, that need - “please.”

“Please, what?” Hux asked as he pulled his mouth briefly away, his white teeth flashing against reddened, swollen lips in a cheshire grin, looking wild and slightly mad, a little too pleased with himself. He let his fingers slide from Ren’s ass, too, and Ren could only whimper for more.

“Please. Finish me. Kill me or -” and Ren’s voice broke then, “I can’t wait anymore.” He was so aroused now, so frustrated that it was starting to hurt, sweet ache giving way to a bruisy heaviness. 

“Mhm.” Hux took hold of Ren’s hips again, his touch careful, appreciative, and then he bent that sleek head to Ren’s cock again, seemed to eat him entire and alive with one long slick glide of that cruel, wicked mouth, and Ren reached down and grabbed at his hair, guided his movements with desperate urgency. Hux resisted him slightly, and Ren tried not to thrust too hard into his mouth, but it was so good, that liquid heat and velvety tongue, the silken lining of his cheeks, and then Ren was coming with another shout, Hux’s name on his lips as he bucked and spent, shivering into that perfect mouth. He could feel Hux swallowing around him as his hearing and vision went, his senses overwhelmed entirely by the shocking bliss of his orgasm. 

Hux was stroking Ren’s hair gently when he opened his eyes again, and Ren realized that he had wept at some point in the past few minutes, the tears still weighing heavily on his eyelashes. Ren blinked them away, then pushed off the mattress briefly and rolled over, tucked his arm around Hux, and they lay like that together, holding tightly to each other in the weary stretched silence of the afterglow. 

It was good to just lie back and look at Hux, at how fucked-out he looked, those cold eyes thawed at last from endorphins. His flush was fading as he caught his breath, but there were places where it still lingered pink on his cheeks, warming the pallor of his skin. He somehow looked more alive than he had been in the last two months, and the difference was exquisite - like sunlight through translucent marble, or a thin wash of pigment on paper. 

“You’re still beautiful, Bren,” Ren said as his capacity for speech returned, and he reached up and stroked Hux’s smooth hair, brushed it yet again out of his eyes. 

Hux blushed, this time more deeply than before, but he did not look away. “So are you, Kylo,” he murmured quietly, before he leaned in for a light, brief kiss. “Everything about you,” Hux whispered, their faces still nearly touching, “How are you so exquisite?” 

Ren felt his face heat with a sudden warmth, laughed. “I was born with it,” he said.

Hux chuckled at that. “Braggart.” His expression stilled then, his gaze turning briefly serious as he looked up again at Ren. “What Phasma said last night. Was it true? Were you really having a difficult time listening to me?”

“It was awful,” Ren sighed, squirming uncomfortably against Hux in a wave of mortification still too fresh from last night. “I guess it’s a little easier now we’ve, you know. Fucked. But last night it was like the emotional equivalent of being waterboarded. Every time I thought I was going to be okay with what I was hearing, you figured out something else clever and creative to do with Frehner, and I just couldn’t block it out of my mind. I started wondering if you were doing it to punish me, and I shouldn’t even be mad at you if you were, because I was a shit and an asshole and I totally deserved it.” 

“No, not at all,” Hux said, his eyes bright with shock, something else unreadable. “I couldn’t. I… suppose I thought… you wouldn’t care, and I was concentrating on the job I had to do. I had to stay focused so I didn’t break my cover. But it was never like that.” Hux kissed him again lightly, moth-wing touches on his eyelids, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up. Is there something I can do to make it better?”

“Let me think about it,” Ren mused. “Right now, I just want a bath.” 

“That’s easily arranged.” Hux slid smoothly out of the sheets and padded towards the bathroom, and Ren remained in bed for a few moments more, watching him as he went. A faint sound of running water came through the open door, and then Ren climbed out of bed himself, the air cool against his sweaty skin, and stepped into the bathroom to join Hux. 

The hotel tub was enormous - it had made Ren think of his childhood, when a bathtub made an excellent replacement for the open sea provided he exercised his imagination, but even so it was probably going to be an interesting experiment for them to both fit in there. 

“I can wait,” Hux said as he read the look on Ren’s face, and then they were both laughing, oddly giddy. 

“No,” Ren said after he managed to stop laughing at the mental images his brain had generated. “C’mere, I’m sure we can do this.”

“Are you sure?” Hux asked as he stepped carefully into the tub, on the opposite end from Ren. “I’d hate to find out how hard you can accidentally kick me from over there.” 

“That would not be in my best interests,” Ren agreed as he crouched and sat in the warm, bubbly water, his knees drawn close to his chest. It took a little squirming and swearing, a process rather like the mutant bastard offspring of Tetris and naked Twister to have them both comfortably soaking in the bath, but the results, Ren thought, were well worth it. 

Hux leaned back against the warmed porcelain and closed his eyes briefly to savor the sudsy bathwater with a long, slow sigh, and Ren could not look away from him, at how relaxed he looked in this moment. A few days ago Ren would have confessed that he did not believe Hux was ever capable of relaxing in any situation, not even in a transcendental meditation session led by the Dalai Lama himself. 

“This is nice,” Hux murmured after a few moments of silence, his eyes opening again. 

“It is,” Ren agreed thoughtfully. “I wonder who we need to talk to so we can get the bath in the townhouse refitted.”

Hux shook his head briefly, chuckled. “I don’t think Phasma’s going to approve that, let alone anyone else higher up on the food chain.”

“I knew there was going to be a catch somewhere,” Ren sighed, and then Hux was reaching beneath the suds to take hold of his left foot, his strong thumbs rubbing gently over Ren’s instep, fingers making deep, soothing circles on the sole of his foot. “When I build my house,” Ren said as Hux continued working the stress out of his foot, “it’s going to have a jacuzzi.” Hux shifted his grip then, kneaded gently in the arch of Ren’s foot, and he sighed with delight. “It’s going to be big enough for anyone I might want in it, with me.” He grinned lazily then at Hux, and then sighed with contentment as Hux let go of his left foot, reached for his right. 

“That’s an invitation, I assume,” Hux said as he started to massage Ren’s right instep. It felt like sorcery. Somehow all the excess tension in his neck and shoulders and the bumps of his spine started to seep out of him, as though he were bleeding it off into the bathwater through the soles of his feet. 

“Permanent and gold-plated,” Ren murmured, and he let his eyes shut and leaned back against the tub. He could hear, dimly, the buzz of a phone in the next room. He ignored it. Whoever it was could wait until Hux was done with his magic. 

“Have you thought, Kylo,” Hux murmured, as he worked the soreness out of Ren’s sole, “of what you would like me to do for you? Besides this, of course.” 

“You could teach me,” Ren laughed, the laugh turning into a giggle as Hux tweaked his pinky toe, “But right now I have more specific ideas about what I’d like to do with you.” 

“Specificity is good,” Hux murmured. He probed at the soles of Ren’s feet, looking for more tension points, before he let go. 

Ren leaned closer then, started to list things off on his fingers, his language filthy, descriptive, colorful. Hux’s smile widened as he listened to Ren, and then there was a sudden sound of water running down the drain. 

“Oh dear,” Hux said, completely deadpan, as he held up the drain plug on its chain. “I seem to have accidentally drained the bath. I suppose there’s nothing for it but to towel off and return to the bedroom.” 

“What a tragedy.” Ren grinned then at the way Hux flushed, and thought of several more things to add to the list.

\---

They missed breakfast with Phasma, and lunch also, and Hux only checked his phone as they were getting dressed and ready to join her for dinner. Ren had been lacing his boots up when Hux started laughing convulsively, each bark staccato and punctuated with a faint wheeze.

“What’s wrong?” Ren asked. He had never, ever heard Hux laugh like this before. And then Hux tried to straighten up, pressed his phone into Ren’s hand. 

_Dear Rory,_ the text message read, _I do not want to leave you feeling used, but it is still too soon after my divorce for me to consider a long-term relationship with anyone. I desperately needed to be loved last night, and you love so wonderfully and generously. Thank you, and I am so sorry. Émelie._

“I think that needs to go on your performance review, Bren,” Ren said even as Hux sat down on the bed, still laughing silently, his shoulders shaking. “I have some comments to add to that, too.”

“Hush, Kylo,” Hux said as Ren handed the phone back to him. He took a rough hold of Ren’s shirt collar, pulled his face down, and silenced him with a kiss. 

They nearly missed dinner with Phasma, too.


	6. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the first day of the rest of their lives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is. The epilogue. Tying all those ends together, except the ones we purposefully left out for future ficulations.

Phasma snipped off the excess yarn from the grafted toe of her sock, and she rummaged around in her notions bag for a few seconds, before she found the little tube of darning needles behind her stitch holders. She paused then and looked up between the two seats in front of her, saw that Hux and Ren were still asleep. They had fallen asleep shortly after takeoff, and would likely remain unconscious until their plane landed in Dulles Airport. She had the distinct feeling that they had not managed much sleep after the Luxembourg job, but she also knew too well what they had been doing to tire themselves out so much, and she felt little to no sympathy for their current state of exhaustion. 

Ren had slumped to the right, resting his head on Hux’s shoulder, while Hux had leant his pale cheek against Ren’s dark, wavy hair. One or both of them would probably wake up with a sore neck if they weren’t careful, but she wasn’t about to separate them - for one, they deserved sore necks, and two, they looked rather tooth-rottingly sweet like that. 

Phasma threaded the yarn-end through her smallest darning needle and fed it through the toe of the sock, turned it inside-out around her hand so she could weave the end into the wrong side of the stitches. She thought of their brief stopover in Heathrow, and how Ren had taken his first experimental taste of a Melton Mowbray pork pie. He had poked at the gray filling cautiously, no doubt expecting something like a nightmarish petrol station pie, and then popped a morsel into his mouth and chewed. The look on his face after he had swallowed was nothing less than beatific, and Hux, watching him, had looked like a sunrise. 

Hux had bought her one, too, and she had accepted it, gratified faintly at his attempt to mollify her. She noticed then that his hands no longer bore that faint metallic smell, that he was no longer playing constantly with the little brass key that he carried in his pocket. 

_Maybe this is good for him,_ she thought then, and hoped fervently that it would also mean that they would start acting like adults in short order. She had spent too long working with men who assumed that her gender was a guarantee of comforting, nurturing behavior to perform any one else’s emotional labor for them, anymore, and even had she not drawn so firm a line, these two had had all the consideration they deserved from her when she had decided, somewhat reluctantly, that she couldn't actually justify stabbing them. It would be nice, she thought, if they would make her want to do that less frequently from now on. 

Phasma finished weaving the end in on the sock, snipped the excess yarn off with a tiny pair of embroidery scissors, and then put the darning needles and other notions away. She then picked up her double-pointed needles and the remainder of the yarn, and began to cast on for another sock. Maybe she could finish this one before the month was out. 

\---

Alec liked to think he was pretty bright, generally. Maybe not likely to solve any theorems, or cure cancer; he was okay with that. There was no point in tailoring a lab coat. But smart enough, at least, to know when to talk, when to listen, when to watch, and when to keep his mouth shut. 

Will Ellis had done less talking than almost anyone Alec had ever dated. At least, using words. He’d been pretty loud about the way he was looking at his coworker, that first evening they’d met, and Alec wasn't so sure that Tall Dark and Awkward wasn't looking back much the same way. Will’s words had said “single, no chance,” but his eyes had said “single, no hope,” which was something quite different. 

Alec had thrown his hat in the ring. Why not. Will seemed clever, and Alec liked smart guys. He was devastatingly good-looking without being all Hollywood about it. And there was absolutely some truth in Will’s joke about how badly Alec wanted to get Will’s suit jacket off him and study its construction. His fingertips ached to run over the seams. It was one of the most beautiful suits he’d ever seen in person, and he had studied more than enough to know what he was looking at. He didn't actually think, looking at Will, that he’d mind the admiration at all. 

Will had called the next day, asked Alec out on a proper date like they weren't just in this for some quick skin-to-skin. Of course he’d said yes. Dinner had been lovely, and Will had refused to split the check, so Alec had felt it was only gracious to invite Will back to his place for a nightcap. 

By the time he’d left, in the morning, Alec had decided he owed the customer service gods a decent sacrifice this month. Whatever higher power had dropped Will Ellis in his lap clearly loved him and wanted him to be happy. 

By way of karma, he’d put a note on Kylo Ren’s customer file at work. He would get the VVIP treatment any time he set foot inside. It seemed the least he could do to pay it forward. Every now and then, though, as his relationship with Will had somehow turned into a real thing that they were doing all the time, he’d get an answer to a question or catch a look in Will’s eyes, and he’d think back to the customer information section of that file and wonder if maybe it wouldn't be merciful to send Ren a quick anonymous text, post a note with no return address: _Dear Friend. Your roommate is in love with you. He's also terrific in bed, you should REALLY look into that, I mean it._

Alec had a pretty good idea of why Will, at least, consummately professional and strict with himself, might not have made the first move. He was clearly CIA. Maybe MI6 as well. Alec didn't think organisations like that were generally thrilled about their employees fucking. But it did seem a shame. 

Will had been looking more and more frayed, lately, insofar as anyone so ruthlessly groomed ever could look frayed, and Alec had been glad when he’d announced he was going away for a bit. He’d known better than to ask where, but maybe a change of scenery, no matter where that scenery belonged to, would do Will good. 

When he’d texted to say he was back, and asked Alec to dinner in their favourite spot, Alec had been delighted to walk in and see him there, with colour in his cheeks, a sparkle in his eyes that Alec had never seen before. 

“Alec,” Will had said, warm as his accent ever got, and kissed him on the cheek, and he knew. 

“You’ve met someone else,” Alec said gently, after he sat down. “Haven't you.”

Will blinked at him, shocked. “How did you…”

“Never mind,” Alec said, “never mind how I knew.” He squeezed Will’s hand. “Just tell me one thing, okay? No, two things.”

“Anything,” Will said, and for a second Alec considered all the ways that permission could be misused, but just smiled. 

“Please, and I am going to be really, really angry with you if the answer is no - _please_ tell me you finally fucked your roommate.”

Will went white, and then pink. “I did,” he admitted softly. 

“And please tell me that he's the reason you look so happy.”

The pink deepened. “He is.”

“Thank fuck,” Alec said, deeply heartfelt. “If I’d lost you to anyone else but him I might have had to suggest you get your head examined.”

“Oh, Alec.” Will looked like he had no idea what had just happened. “Sweet Alec. How did you ever end up with an arse like me?”

“Just lucky, I guess,” Alec said warmly, and squeezed his hand again. “Look, no regrets, all right? We had fun. But you're in love with him, and you have been for months. You got him. And if you don't invite me to the wedding I'm never speaking to you again.”

Will laughed, an astonishingly vulnerable edge to it. “You aren't real. Anyone else would have thrown a glass of wine over me by now.”

“I am, in fact, a fairy,” Alec pointed out. “And I could never throw wine on any of your suits, that would hurt me.” Then he looked seriously at Will. “Would it be easier if I left now?”

“No, no,” Will said hastily, desperately. “No, please stay. Let me buy you dinner, and walk you home, it's the least I owe you after all you’ve put up with from me.”

“I can accept that,” Alec said.

Dinner was excellent, and Alec tried to enjoy it on its own merits. Will was as charming a conversationalist as always, with a full dinner’s worth of non-specific stories that technically could have taken place anywhere, and Alec wondered to himself as Will walked him home.

“Will I see you again?” he asked quietly, standing on the front steps of his apartment building.

Will smiled, a little sadly. “I’ll invite you to the wedding.”

“Call me if he needs a suit.” Alec grinned, and then impulsively leaned forward and hugged Will. “And if he breaks your heart,” he said into Will’s collar, “and none of your non-specifically scary friends want to make him disappear, I have some really sharp fabric shears and you can sleep on my couch.”

 _“Alec,”_ Will said, and hugged him back, tightly. “Please find someone who deserves you.”

“Can't be done,” Alec said lightly, and let him go. “I’m just too nice.”

Maybe he was, he thought, as he watched Will walk away.

He stayed up too late that night, looking at bolts of cloth on the internet and imagining all of them in their final form, and dreamed about the smell of tailor’s chalk and Will’s cologne.

It wasn't heartbreak, but it took him a couple of days to feel properly bouncy again. He spent the weekend letting his nieces put barrettes in his hair and paint his toenails with water-soluble nail polish, and by the time his shift on Monday afternoon came around, he felt ready to face D.C.’s finest again.

“Hey, Alec,” Janie said from behind the counter. “I’m glad you're early, I need to run to the bank. Oh, and a guy dropped this off for you.”

She pulled a slim white envelope out of the till and handed it to him. _Alec,_ it said, in beautifully precise cursive.

“What’d he look like?” Alec said, though he was fairly sure he knew. 

Janie looked dreamily out at the street. “Killer suit. Red hair. Very pretty. Friend of yours?”

“Yeah,” Alec said, and smiled as he headed into the back room, wedging his finger under the flap of the envelope and tearing it open.

Janie found him in the back room, ten minutes later, sitting with his back against the wall and his legs splayed out in front of him, staring at the papers in his shaking hands.

“Are you okay, hon?” she said, crouched down next to him and squeezed his shoulder.

He brushed at the tears on his cheeks and looked up at her, held up the papers, tried to speak and couldn't. 

She took them. “Oh, _honey,”_ she breathed. “This is a ticket to Heathrow. What did you do?”

“It’s a ticket - to fucking London,” Alec hiccupped, “and a personal recommenda-dation to the tailor - who made that killer suit - and oh my _God_ , Janie.”

He put his face in his hands for a minute, then, and just shook. She hugged him. “I am gonna miss you,” she said.

“I haven't even decided,” he said, and sniffed wetly.

“Yes you have,” Janie said soothingly, and reached in her handbag for a tissue, pressing it into Alec's hands. “You’re going, I accept your resignation, and in ten years when you're famous you better remember this moment and introduce me to a hot suit model.”

Alec giggled, watery but real, and mopped his face. “Deal.”

“Wash your face and take ten,” Janie said gently. “Come out when you're ready.”

Alec grinned, and waved a hand theatrically. “Darling, I’ve been out for years.”

He folded the papers and tucked them back in the envelope, glancing at the note Will had written across the bottom.

_I hope this makes up for everything. Thank you. Maybe I'll see you there._

He slipped the envelope into his breast pocket, and said a little grateful prayer to the customer service gods, and stood up. 

\---

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Kylo Ren asked Hux, as they stood looking at flowers in a florist’s shop.

“I can’t exactly get her a bouquet of guns and knives, Kylo,” Hux had murmured, vaguely irritated as his gaze passed over roses, carnations, chrysanthemums, zinnias.

“Why not? This is America, I’m sure there’s someone out there making them,” Ren said, and then there was a soft throat-clearing sound behind them. 

“Do you gentlemen need help?” the florist asked. She had only started her day, but Ren registered the thin smudges of powdered floral foam under her fingernails, tried his charmingest smile. 

“We need to get some flowers,” Ren said.

The florist smiled warmly at him, and he read the tag on her apron. _Janice._ “What is the event?” she asked.

“We have disappointed a coworker and wish to apologize,” Hux said, just a little stiffly, “Do you know what Phasma likes?” he whispered briefly to Ren, who shook his head. “We’re not entirely sure what to get for her.”

“You could get her a potted plant for her desk, in case flowers seem too personal?” Janice offered helpfully. 

“Oh, that’s a good idea,” Hux said, “we don’t need to compound our mistakes by getting her a bouquet that could mean something terrible in the language of flowers.” He turned from the flowers in their bucket rack to a shelf full of cacti, dwarf succulents and other hardy office plants. 

“I don’t think she speaks the language of flowers,” Ren shrugged. “Besides, there’s several: the Victorian English, the Japanese _hanakotoba_ -”

“Given the way the past two months have turned out,” Hux told him, “it seems likely that I would pick something that meant something bad in all the flower languages of the world.”

“Doubtful, but sure, pick a cute potted plant. Hey, there’s a cactus.” Ren pointed to a little cactus in a terracotta pot, its stubby stem surmounted by a great big blossom on its top.

“I don’t think she’d be flattered by a cactus,” Hux mused thoughtfully. “How about one of these succulents?” 

Ren poked experimentally at a miniature sedum. “They look kind of meh. Not really badass enough for her.”

Janice laughed a little then, and pointed to the shelf next to the succulent plants and cacti. “If you’re looking for badass, gentlemen, we do have some venus flytraps over here.”

“Cool!” Ren picked one up, in its little plastic pot and tickled one of the little leaf-traps until it closed on his fingertip. “Bren, check this out, it’s tiny and cute!”

Hux picked up another venus flytrap, considered it carefully as he rotated the pot in his hand to study the leaves from all angles. “That’s… do you think she’ll get the wrong impression?” he asked.

“I’m sure giving someone a venus flytrap means that you think they’ll eat their prey alive,” said Ren, “which is pretty true for her.”

“Point. I hope we survive giving it to her, then.” Hux paid for the venus flytrap and a card. “We’ll fill this out on the way to work,” he said, handing Ren both the plant and the card. “You go first.”

Ren cradled the tiny venus flytrap in his lap all the way to work, and on the drive he told Hux about how the plants grew only in the Green Swamp in North Carolina, about their nomenclature, and how their Latin name, _Dionaea muscipula,_ had alluded to a very, very dirty joke by early botanists. 

Hux only listened quietly, his head tilted as he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, but he smiled as Ren related a particularly ribald part of the Venus Flytrap’s history. The rising sun slanted low across the car windscreen, painting his pale hands gold, and Ren had paused and grinned then. He felt so incredibly lucky to be here, to have someone to listen to his random botanical knowledge. 

“You’ve gone quiet,” Hux said as they turned left at an intersection to find 190E. 

“I’m just thinking how you’d make a good dad if your kids were all carnivorous plants. Say hi to daddy, Audrey,” Ren told the potted venus flytrap, mock-seriously.

“I love you too, you bloody great idiot,” Hux said, affectionately, as they drove to work. 

\---

Phasma got out of her car in employee parking and walked in the front door of 1000 Colonial Farm Road. She bypassed the security check as usual, and wondered what Hux and Ren had been conspiring on this morning. They had left her breakfast - eggs Benedict with a fruit cup and nicely brewed tea - and then left the house together as she had sat down to eat. 

“We have to take care of something,” Ren said just as she had come down the stairs to find the table set and breakfast already made, and then he had vanished out the front door. Hux had personally made breakfast every morning since their return from Luxembourg, and annoyed as she still was with him for his lapse in professionalism, she had to admit that he was fairly good at it. 

Ren had been less overtly apologetic, but then he had taken the initiative to handle the dishes and vacuum the carpets in her stead, which was the least he could have done, and she was at least mollified, if not completely happy about how things had turned out. Besides, Hux smiled more often now, and something of the bright young artist had crept back into Ren’s demeanor, and they had achieved a state of vague domestic peace without the tension, petulance and sheer disdain for operational security that had characterized their first two months living together. 

Not having to worry about Ren picking a stranger up and bringing them home was almost worth the scalding awkwardness and intrusion of having to listen to them fuck in her dreams. Almost. 

She knew that she would arrive in the office to find coffee already in her mug, black as she liked it. Ren would be at his drafting table drawing intricate blueprints, or gluing model buildings together with a deft, delicate touch, and Hux would be sitting at his desk, looking over dossiers or a medical journal. 

They were nowhere in sight today, however. A lone copy of _The Lancet_ testified mutely to Hux having been there, but Ren’s architectural models were as yet untouched, the drafting table empty of blueprints. And then she noticed it, a touch of green on her desk where there had been none before: a tiny potted plant, and a card. 

Phasma stepped curiously to her desk, put her laptop bag down, and picked up the potted plant to study it. The pot had been filed with sphagnum moss instead of potting soil, and poking out through the substrate was a small cluster of longish leaves tipped with tiny, spiny jaws - a venus flytrap. She smiled faintly at the tiny carnivorous plant as she put it down on her desk, and then picked up the card. She opened it up to look at the writing inside, and then laughed out loud at what she found within. 

~~“I formally apologize for-”~~

~~“I have disappointed you and for -”~~

~~“I should have known better tha -”~~

“I’m sorry.”

All of the words had been written in a very pretty hand that she had recognized instantly as Hux’s. On the left side of the card, beside the writing, was a tiny sketch, a fist with its thumb up, and spiky draftsman’s printing:

“thanks for not killing us”

 _Oh, you two,_ she thought fondly, before she put the card down and sat down at her desk to sip from her full, still-warm mug.


End file.
